Inventories for March releases
Posted by Huw,
Inventories for 18 sets and 74 new parts have been added to LEGO Customer Services, and to our database.
Among the new parts are 1x1 tiles of various shapes, both in new colours and printed, which appear in the Dots sets.
What's particularly interesting is that the random assortment of printed tiles in 41908 Extra Dots are listed with a single design ID and element ID: 67222 / 6299968. Richard at The Rambling Brick has written an great article about their distribution if you want to find out more.
10271 Fiat 500 is the first large set to make extensive use of cool yellow (LEGO ID 226) pieces, but you might be surprised to learn that there are no less than 40 new pieces in that colour in the set, while the inventory shows that it contains a total of 375 cool yellow parts.
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31 comments on this article
I actually realized that I might need to buy the Fiat 500, after all, just for the parts...
I am surprised that the offical parts list for 2020 technic sets are -still- not complete: 42108 for example has 856 parts in its list while to total number is given as 1292. Thus roughly 1/3 of pices isn't accounted for.
Hmmmmmm....
The printed tiles in the Extra Dots set sharing an ID reminds me of how the rubber "Krana" and "Kraata" collectibles from the Bionicle theme did the same. In the case of those, six to eight shape variants in a single color would come off the same mold and sets containing them would include a fixed color but a random shape (apart from the dedicated collectible packs which drew from the full range of available colors and shapes).
This is a little different, of course. In this case the shape of all the tiles is the same, and the fact that they are printed differently suggests that they are processed separately before being "randomly" mixed together. Still, the shared ID suggests that after being printed they are stored and sorted into sets as a mixed assortment, which is perhaps a part of how so many distinct printed parts can be included in sets so cost-effectively (especially considering that subsequent "series" are likely to include their own separate assortments of printed parts).
@chefkaspa, I'll re-import them.
Odd that all the Dots tiles are given the same PatternID...but given that Lego assigns both Pattern IDs and Design ID a number of 5 digits they've got to be running out of numbers. Like Torsos (76382), I wonder if tiles will all will fall under this new ID (or just those for Dots).
@Lyichir:
A large part of the problem with allowing unlimited elements is simply storing them. By dumping them all into a single hopper and distributing them randomly, you allow greater variety without impacting the pick/pack process, and having minimal impact on the storage process (they do need to have a way to reliably mix them up so people don't just get clumps of a single design because the parts all just form layers in the hopper).
@shaase:
Element ID numbers are currently running 6-7 digits long. Presumably the 6-digit numbers are actually 7-digit numbers that start with "0", since I've never seen one that does. Shapes get smaller numbers because a single mold could end up producing dozens of different colors and hundreds of different prints, all of which would require a unique Element ID number.
I can't be happy for 40 new pieces in a rare and unimportant color while we still don't have useful parts in White, Tan, Black.
@PurpleDave there's a distinction between ElementID and DesignID/PatternID. ElementIDs used to be assigned an ID based on its DesignID + ColourID, i.e. 3068 (2x2 Tile) + 26 (Black). This all changed when Lego used up all 4 digit DesignIDs and 2 digit ColourIDs....thus the current 7 digit ElementIDs. Currently for the most part Lego assigns a 5 digit PatternID whenever an Element appears with a pattern (even transparent or metallic). Using 2x2 Tile you have 3068 which gives you all the colours (https://brickset.com/parts/design-3068) or for metallics https://brickset.com/parts/design-63327) and then of course all the various patterns (https://brickset.com/parts?query=Flat%20Tile%202X2,%20No).
Thats why I say Lego has do be running out of 5 digits DesignID/PatternID and will need to make an adjustment.
The rainbow poop emoji on galaxy background is my new favorite print.
@Lyichir The shear number of Kraata variations is incredible. Only 7 of the 42 Rahkshi species made into sets, and most of those extra ones were just invented to explain the different Kraata colors.
@shaase, I think the change from designID+colourID for element IDs occurred, when the company adopted SAP for its inventory and SKU management, not because of any lack of numbers.
If you are unaware (like me) that there is a color called "cool yellow", the last paragraph sounds kinda funny. :-)
@PurpleDave: From what I've seen, the 6-digit Element IDs generally belong to elements that have been in production for a particularly long time. What's more, they follow a rather particular numbering rule — rather than just being assigned arbitrary element IDs in the order in which they're introduced, as appears to be the case from around 1996 onward, older elements are simply identified by a combination of the Design ID and the Material ID.
For example, https://brickset.com/parts/302324 (Bright Yellow 1x2 plate) is numbered as it is because the Design ID for a 1x2 plate is 3023, and the Material ID for the color Bright Yellow is 24.
Where it sometimes confusing is that if a part is taken out of production and later put back into production, it is often assigned a new Element ID using the newer numbering system. So this is why some parts might have 7-digit Element IDs in set inventories and LEGO's Customer Service database, even if they first appeared in sets before the switch to 7-digit Element IDs.
But conversely, if an element from 1995 or earlier has remained in production since it was first introduced, as in the case of the Bright Yellow 1x2 plate linked above, then LEGO continues to identify it by the straightforward 6-digit Element ID it was originally assigned.
@Felix_Mezei : See, from my perspective, I like seeing huge swaths of new elements in colors we haven't seen too much of previously. Introducing new elements in colors that are currently "rare and unimportant" is the only way those colors can ever become "common and versatile".
It says a lot that many AFOLs only began noticing the existence of colors like Flame Yellowish Orange, Light Royal Blue, Bright Green, Cool Yellow, Bright Bluish Green, Light Purple, Bright Purple, Bright Reddish Violet, and Nougat within the past decade, even though all those colors have been around since at least 2004. Bright Green in particular dates as far back as far as 1993, and Nougat has been used in Duplo since 1979!
Before the 2010s, the only extensive use of these colors tended to be in themes like Belville, Bionicle, Duplo, and Hero Factory that were disregarded by a lot of System builders, or miscellaneous minifigure parts that were not practical to build a color scheme around.
At that time, as LEGO was struggling to pare down their bloated color palette from the late 90s and early 2000s, there was still a sharp division between common, "useful" colors like Bright Red or Bright Blue, and numerous rare "specialty" colors that only showed up in noticeable variety in a handful of themes, if they showed up in a noticeable variety at all!
But now that LEGO has successfully reduced their color palette to around 60 core colors, and has introduced girl-oriented, mechanical-oriented, and action figure lines that are more in line with core LEGO building standards, the remaining "specialty colors" have expanded enough that they are closer than ever to losing that distinction.
They are already far more versatile than when they were first introduced, and many of them have cemented their value within the LEGO color palette, with greater variety and versatility than even a lot of far older colors like Fabuland Bever achieved. I'm happy to see that trend continue!
@Aanchir .
You got me wrong. I have nothing against rare and unimportant colors. But not being happy WHILE some parts are STILL missing in White, Dark Stone, Tan or Black.
Good luck in making architecture, castles and other buildings in purple, yellowish and others!
Please read and understand the logic from "can't be happy....while...still don't have.."
I hope you don't dream about a "way those colors can ever become "common and versatile". Not in a real world. They will never replace White, Black, Tan.
Waiting for a white 38585, 36841 and for 16 years for a simple white 3044.
I didn't knew there is a politically correct for LEGO colors.
I wanted to make after 2016 a specific house from your country, instead of white in some lavanda, pink or something matching what that real house become in the last years.
Probably I will be able to do it now. It's time.
Shame that the Fiaat 500 doesn't sell the painting alone.
@Felix_Mezei said:
" @Aanchir .
You got me wrong. I have nothing against rare and unimportant colors. But not being happy WHILE some parts are STILL missing in White, Dark Stone, Tan or Black.
Good luck in making architecture, castles and other buildings in purple, yellowish and others!
Please read and understand the logic from "can't be happy....while...still don't have.."
I hope you don't dream about a "way those colors can ever become "common and versatile". Not in a real world. They will never replace White, Black, Tan.
Waiting for a white 38585, 36841 and for 16 years for a simple white 3044.
I didn't knew there is a politically correct for LEGO colors.
I wanted to make after 2016 a specific house from your country, instead of white in some lavanda, pink or something matching what that real house become in the last years.
Probably I will be able to do it now. It's time."
Jeez, people will find any excuse to call things they don't like "politically correct" these days, won't they? Nothing in this comment thread had a single thing to do with politics and yet you somehow were able to find a way to claim you were being persecuted for... liking tan. Get a grip.
My sister was just sharing why she appreciates less common colors becoming more common. That doesn't mean it wouldn't also be nice to get parts that don't currently come in colors like black, white, and tan, but to be honest there are so many parts available in those colors already that new parts in those colors make less of an impact (since in many of the cases where a part doesn't yet come in that color, there are probably plenty of different parts or building techniques that could substitute for them in a pinch). Conversely, if you need a pale yellow color like this for a MOC, every new part helps tremendously because the previously existing options were so slim.
My mom's been trying to convince me to try to MOC a building from her college that's this color and has been for over 100 years. Sets like this one that expand the palette of potential parts in that color make a huge difference in whether that's feasible.
@Felix_Mazei : I mean, yeah, I understand that not every part exists in those already common colors, but the selection in those colors has never really been too limited for my needs — not even when working on castles and buildings.
After all, not only are there plenty of fairly straightforward ways to cover or otherwise tastefully integrate occasional non-matching colors to create the appearance of brick or stone structures, but I personally far prefer seeing and building those types of models in vibrant and imaginative color schemes over keeping them limited to bland, monochrome earth tones.
One of my biggest frustrations with the castle WIP I've been hammering away at on stud.io is that currently, a lot of the more interesting colors I explore the possibility of using are far more expensive than dull colors like gray and black. And while I don't mind using these colors as a base, when they start to dominate the color scheme at the expense of more exciting or unique-looking colors, it really kills my interest in the MOC's overall appearance.
Plus, even in real life, historical structures were rarely as dull and sterile looking as we expect to see today — it's just that the majority of surviving medieval and pre-medieval structures have been stripped bare over the centuries by both the elements and restoration attempts that disregarded their original appearance: https://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewgabriele/2018/09/12/middle-ages-garish-colors/
Suffice to say, I'll take a castle like 41167-1 , 41078-1 , 41880-1 , or 41188-1 over a dreary monochrome one any day!
EDIT: Somehow I responded to your post earnestly without even noticing your outlandish accusation of "political correctness". Certainly I've seen plenty of examples of how surrounding oneself with alarmist delusions about why diversity is a nefarious scheme to tear apart civilization or whatever can rot the brain, but I never thought I'd see people get so far down the rabbit hole as to think that liking bright colors is some type of political propaganda!
I must say, I’m very surprised at how fast this comment thread deteriorated.
@Backbiter222:
Let's try to get it back on track than, shall we?
@shaase:
I wasn't aware of that origin for 6-digit numbers, but I may have noticed it once before with LEGO Champions (there was a whole string of consecutive numbers for 2x4 bricks in different colors, which I found very odd at the time). However, I think Huw's right. I have the instructions for Clayface from TLBM. The EID for the 1x2 45 slope in caramel is 6058135. With right eye print, it's 6172479, and with left eye print it's 6172476. I'm not sure why they skipped 6172477 and 6172478, since neither appears to have been assigned (maybe the print designer thought it would be amusing to flip the 6 into a 9 since the eye patterns are basically mirror images of each other?).
Still, doing it that way means any new numbers fall into the 1,000,000+ range, and any pre-existing 6-digit number could be written with or without a zero at the front and still make sense (depending on how their inventory management works, they may have to do this).
@Aanchir:
Now, I have been aware for some time that any element that goes out of production long enough to be purged from their inventory always gets a new EID assigned when it goes back into production. Dark purple 2x4 bricks have at least three, for instance, because there were gaps of five and two years since they were first introduced.
@Felix_Mezei:
Actually...castles, being made of stone, were generally made in whatever color stone they could find to quarry. The original Yellow Castle gets a ridiculous amount of grief for being an "unrealistic" color, but look up Hohenschwangau Castle in Bayern, Germany. There's also the Dower House in Bristol, England. There are white castles, pink castles, black castles, tan castles, and any other color you can carve out of the earth. Cool Yellow might actually be perfect for either of the two castles I just mentioned.
Mostly recolors I see. That's ok. I usually prefer solving the puzzle with given pieces, not by making up new pieces but I guess it was necessary. It's just, this strategy makes previous sets obsolete. Being able to build a set you don't have with the ones you own was part of the fun. This way it is getting harder to do so.
@PurpleDave said:
" I'm not sure why they skipped 6172477 and 6172478, since neither appears to have been assigned"
The same number series is used for everything: parts, boxes, instruction manuals, leaflets, catalogues, plastic bags, packing cases. Everything that LEGO produces or uses, so they were not necessarily allocated to parts.
@CCC
I believe was a waste of time to say what I think. Hopefully people will be able to read and understand better what you wrote.
I am happy everybody will be finally able to replicate 1 castle, 1 car, 1 building mom's like, and hopefully thousands of creations finally this color will made possible.
I visited Hohenschwanghau Castle 10 times in the last 11 years and I can say that sitting inside and watching thru its windows, everybody can see one of the most famous and visited castle in the world and unfortunately that one is white (grey-white), a color in which LEGO it's still not willing to provide all shapes available.
"Waiting for a white 38585, 36841 and for 16 years for a simple white 3044."
Dude, those first two pieces came out in the last two years. Give it some time. Before they existed, builders needed to find other solutions, and now that they're out, you're complaining there aren't enough colors of them? I could make the point that they're both examples of those "unnecessary" and "single use pieces" that people are always complaining about, especially the corner arch. Personally, the 6117317 1x2 brick with 2 studs on one side is perfect for my Enterprise Rental Car building, which is built in Sand Red and Cool Yellow but has one light gray 1x2 brick with 2 studs on the side that the clock is attached to, which sticks out like a sore thumb on the side of the building. I hoped that one day it would be available in Cool Yellow, and my patience has paid off.
And you can talk about the "timelessness" of white, black, and tan, but unless you're building a monochrome building or city, you've gotta have some splashes of color. I love that brackets are available in blue so that my parking kiosk isn't light gray against a light gray monorail pillar. Heck, how rare was tan until the late 90s? It's so ubiquitous now that it's easy to forget how limited its availability was for a long time.
On a long enough timeline, as long as specific colors and parts are still produced, eventually most, if not all, pieces will exist in the majority of colors. Very few things are color locked, and the majority of those are Technic pieces. I'm surprised, though maybe I shouldn't be, at all the complaining, as more colors of more pieces is a good thing and I fail to see otherwise.
@Felix_Mezei said:
"I can't be happy for 40 new pieces in a rare and unimportant color while we still don't have useful parts in White, Tan, Black."
I'm still waiting for that 1x2 - 2x2 bracket, or the plate 2x2 modified with studs, or the 1x2 with curved top, all in dark grey.
@Felix_Mezei:
You can see all the way to Orlando from Hohenschwanghau Castle?!?!?!?
@PurpleDave
If you are average smart to open your eyes to the right direction, and you have an average quality eyes, you can see from Hohenschwanghau windows, the beautiful Neuschwanstein Castle.
I hope now you understand.
To some people surprise, there's life outside USA too.
It makes me giggle when people complain about the lack of specific parts in specific colors. Now try to imagine building stuff only with the parts that were available up to 1982, back before I entered the "dark ages". I like new parts, but had great fun with my cousins building back when there were not so many specialized parts to choose from, too.
@Huw:
Right. I did plug one retired EID into Bricklink and got back a sticker sheet instead. Maybe they've already started reusing those numbers.
@rslotb:
Right now I very much want the matching 1x1-1x1 bracket (down?) in dark-bley, because I just built Starro the Conqueror and there are tiny patches of light-bley on the tips of the tentacles while the rest of the build (except the eye) is a mixture of dark-purple and dark-bley. As with sewing, mismatched lighter colors stand out more than darker colors.
@Felix_Mezei:
Yeah, I got it the first time. I was poking fun at the fact that there's apparently a lot of disagreement over what is the most visited, most famous, and most photographed castle on Earth, and a large part of that (from what I understand) hinges on whether or not you consider WDW's Cinderella's Castle to be a legitimate castle more than how the numbers are tallied between the two. It's kind of like the tiff between Beatles fans and Elvis fans over the fact that the Beatles hold the record for most records sold, while Elvis fans feel that 45's shouldn't count (at which point Elvis beats the Beatles on LPs, especially since his label kept churning out "new" Elvis Christmas albums long after he croaked).
@PurpleDave
You see...I was right people nowadays don't read carefully.
To respect your language, please see the difference between "one of the most famous and visited", and "what is the most visited, most famous, and most photographed"
To finish this with a joke, I will remember you after finishing my 30-50.000 parts Neuschwanstein and I will easily make a Hohenschwanghau Castle by using just the doors from the Fiat 500 because they have almost the same color and they are looking like a castle walls especially after some dust will be between the parts.
Thanks for your opinions!
@datsunrobbie
I understand your comparison between 40 years ago and now, but this is an anti-progress view, not specific to human race.
If in my early 17 years living in communism I was searching for a bread in 10 government own groceries until I found one, I think it is not a mistake now in 2020 to complain if in a restaurant the bread is not good.
Me and other people above didn't ask LEGO to invest in making new shape parts. But if they have the mold already, why not providing to us (their clients) some basic colors in that shape? We waited 4-5 years for a TAN masonry brick.
I don't care how hard was for some or even for LEGO 40 years ago that they came out with a yellow castle. The compromises in accepting that a creation "looks like" a real thing replicated, were also huge. I am looking at early Statue of Liberty or even to nowadays Santa.
I am sure such wonderful creations like people today do were not made in those years, so why not ask LEGO now, to provide all range in some of the most used colors?
I understand it is impossible to satisfy all needs, unless they will discover that Millenium Falcon was in lavanda before being white, before being grey.
@Felix_Mezei:
And yet Cinderella's Castle is an exact fit for your original description. It _is_ one of the most famous castles in the world. It _is_ one of the most visited castles in the world. And it _is_ mostly white in color. I wouldn't have made the joke if it didn't work, which means I actually had to read your post carefully. I also knew exactly which castle you meant.
As for the rest of your response, it's very easy to be the person on the outside complaining about how such-and-such part doesn't come in the colors you'd like to see. Believe me, I've been there _a_lot_. There are six colors that I've regularly used for building cars (the Mondrian colors plus orange), and every time a useful new piece comes out I'm want-listing it in the "missing" colors. I did this for double-cheese wedges (three years to get all six colors), 1x3 tiles (only one year), 2x4 tiles (two years), and they just finally filled in the last color for 2x3 tiles after four years. I knew it was going to be low on the priority list, but I also waited nearly a decade before they finally put out a lime 2x4 tile, and I once bought a $50 set to get two red parts out of it because the set (from Tiny Turbos) had been out several months and nobody was parting it out. So I totally understand the frustration with waiting for holes to be filled. But they're not playing BINGO. In order for them to release an element, there needs to be a set that requires that element, or there needs to be a designer who really desires to work that element into a set. In the latter case, sometimes this happens with "easter egg" parts (like trying to include all the colors of their homeland's national flag in the model), sometimes they just throw odd colors in just because it doesn't matter to the final look of the model, and sometimes they have a few logical choices and choose the road less travelled. But the more niche a part is, the harder it is for them to find a need to use it, or an opportunity to slip it into a design. For newer elements, that can be extremely frustrating, because while you may see that there's an obvious gap in the color lineup, they may see a dozen such gaps and have different priorities on when to fill them.