Design your own LEGO City set
Posted by Huw,
LEGO Labs is trialling a new service in Denmark which allows you to 'design your own LEGO City set' or, rather, configure one from a range of options.
The landing page is accessible from anywhere but the actual configuration page at create.lego-lab.com can only be viewed from within Denmark, or via a VPN configured to make it look like you're in the country.
To save you the trouble I've been through the process and you can view some screenshots after the break.
The tool has been designed 'mobile first' and when loaded up you're presented with a blank canvas.
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First you need to pick one or more minifigures:
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Once you've done that you can choose some vehicles, buildings and animals.
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The most interesting of the building choices is the cake stand, bottom right.
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As you do so, the sub-models are placed on the box-front image and can be moved around to make a pleasing composition.
The progress bar at the top indicates how many more sub-models you can add to the box to fill it, and you can add your name to the bottom corner.
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Then, when it's full and you're happy with your selections, you can click on the cart icon to be taken to the normal LEGO.com checkout.
This is how much I could add before the box was full:
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The sets have a fixed price of 649Kr, which is about $100 and £80.
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I presume the box will be custom printed and filled with pre-packed bags for each of the sub-models you've chosen. Hopefully someone in Denmark can buy one and tell us.
It's certainly an interesting initiative. It's a shame that, currently, many of the vehicle, minifig and building choices revolve around emergency services and cops/robbers, although I tried my best to avoid them in the examples above.
What do you think? Would you like to see it rolled out worldwide?
News via zusammengebaut. Thanks to Lordmoral for the tip-off.
195 likes
89 comments on this article
Dang this looks really cool! Hope they get more buildings in and it comes to EU!
It’s a good idea but would be better with more options but not a bad idea
The thought of sending someone a unique, personalised gift like that is really special. I hope it's successful and they expand the options
WOW!!!!! This is amazing!
I would love to see this, regardless of the time it would take to get it shipped.
Thank you for showing it to us.
It's interesting and I like the idea. It can help fans only get the kinds of models they are interested in. I'm assuming the current selection of models is just for a trial run, so if they do expand this would be very cool. If they do this for other themes it will appeal to even more fans.
I just hope any final pricing is still fair. Usually custom services get quite expensive.
I'm for sure doing this. Gotta get the VPN from my antivirus setup on my laptop to do it, however.
Fixed price is a little high (OK, $100 is nuts for smaller options, but hopefully this price is filler), but the idea is there. Often, I want one vehicle from a larger set, and maybe one or two of the minifigs, but not the other stuff.
The options shown are what CITY sets NEED to be. Simple town-builders. While I have no problem with fire and police sets, it's just we get way too many of both, all the while with them being half-baked as of late. And almost no ambulances. My town's newest fire truck is ten years old, police cars are supposed to be changed out every 5, but my county still has a couple Crown Vics running around since they really can't afford to replace cars. Ambulances, 5, but there are still some 20 year old units in fleets. And City gets a new fire and police theme every year; and we're lucky if we even get an ambulance in terms of medical every 5.
And I love the look of the 2021 (presumably) CITY police officers. My current LE for Brickfield, as I call my town are the old Forest Police officers, since their uniforms closely resemble the county sheriff's office.
I really hope this comes to the UK, and with a few more element choices. This is a really promising idea and I look forward to seeing where it goes, especially as someone who loves City sets with non-emergency service builds in them.
(nothing against emergency services, just have a lot of those builds already)
This looks like a great way for them to provide a greater selection of trains!! I also love the inclusion of the horse and cougar, they are right at home with the rest of the offerings...
I hope that this proves very successful and gets a wider release, both internationally and perhaps in a broader variety of themes and price points as well.
Can’t they just sell these submodels loose? Then you can choose for yourself how many you want to buy and you aren’t stuck to the 100 dollar price mark.
It's probably a good thing I'm not in Denmark to try out LEGO Labs 81007… I'd be making sets like LEGO City Safari Off-Roader Disaster: When 20 Lionesses Attack! ;)
This is awesome! Now do this for a Castle line and include different castle elements like a draw bridge, armor shop, thrown room, corner walls, etc. and I will need to pick up a second job to afford it :D .
Nice, but the options are kind of bland.
This is such a great idea, hopefully if it does well it can expand to other themes!
Certainly an interesting concept.
With more options, it could be even better, getting a set with just buildings , or just vehicles etc.
Could easily be expanded to City Trains & Castle/Pirate/Space as well.
and now for the Castle version... I choose the guard tower with guard, hay wagon with peasant and a peasant kid with his 10 goats :-)
So is this the way they're getting rid of old stock from sets that didn't sell very well? I doubt they would do any new production runs of these old vehicles and buildings.
@mr_Fikou said:
"Can’t they just sell these submodels loose? Then you can choose for yourself how many you want to buy and you aren’t stuck to the 100 dollar price mark."
If LEGO were to sell each build/minifigure loose, there would be all sorts of additional costs: packaging, marketing, overstocking, understocking etc. Those costs can be minimised this way.
I do see your point though. Perhaps different box sizes to suit various price points: £15, £35, £80, £100 and £180.
And as already mentioned by posters above, across other themes: Castle, Ninjago, Friends, Space, or retro- or new sub-themes such as Space (Classic) and City (Zoo).
This will be a nightmare to add to your database @huw
Are the buildings new? Most of them look completely unfamiliar to me
That bank needs to take out a loan from itself and use it to buy a better bank.
Such a fantastic idea, I hope it is successful and expands worldwide.
It's a bit pricey, but I guess they've costed it out to balance supply costs with value compared to other sets.
As an adult buying it, it would be nice to have the price vary with what you choose, even if there's an up-front fee for the empty box. But I guess it's a far easier sell to kids or parents if there's a flat fee and the kid just fills it with whatever they want.
But it's been a long time since I bought a 'My-Own-Train' exactly like this. What have LEGO been doing these last 15 years?
And yes, let's see a Space one!
Can you add duplicates or just one of each? I'd be likely to fill the whole box with the animal options if it were allowed.
Converting the price from DKR to Dollars and Pounds is a bit misleading.
Lego is stupidly expensive in Denmark, even more so than over here in the Netherlands.
Furthermore (for all our US friends) prices are always including all taxes (and VAT is really high in Denmark).
So, if it is successful and would become available for the rest of the world my guess is that around $75,-, €80,- and £62,- would be my guess (well, what the £ will do after januari 1st remains a guess).
Did a quick comparisson. 70436 is 649,- DKR as well.
Is $59.99 in the US, €69.99 in the NL and £59.99 in the UK.
This seems much more reasonable than the custom sets you could make in the late 2000's. The best part from a parent perspective is that you can put the name on the box.
Aha, take that people who thought the link was fake. I would make one with: the crane, the bank truck, the lioness and looking carefully there are more builds, I want this worldwide.
@PurpleDave said:
"That bank needs to take out a loan from itself and use it to buy a better bank."
Or with this you can buy two banks and make it a complete one with modifications....
Where was this with the Donut Shop Opening? I really just want the coffee cart, news van/crew & donut shop.
I suspect this is actually how the City designers come up with new sets each year...
No huskies? :(
If only we could do this with the 501st battle pack.
Giving that pretty much all City cets look the same I believe your theory to be correct. They came up with a bunch of different models in 2005 and have just been using this program from then on.
Wait a minute. If this is true explain Main Square.
@Th3_3m3rald_M1n3cart said:
"Wait a minute. If this is true explain Main Square."
This is a totally separate thing
Cool idea.
Especially for designing unique birthday gifts for kids
Presumably designed for the buildings to sit on the new City road plate system, which is what it needs
The number of minifigs and animals is limited. I've not tried exhaustively but I think you can choose up to 5 or 6 minifigs and one animal. I don't think you can elect to include only vehicles and no buildings, and vice-versa.
When you get near the end of filling the box your choices are limited to the smaller sub-models
Sounds like a fine idea. Price isn’t terrible and I can see some use with the design process.
I hope that we can get a Geonosian Arena through this.
@paulrothwell said:
"Presumably designed for the buildings to sit on the new City road plate system, which is what it needs"
I prefer everything in baseplates honestly.
This is a pretty awesome idea. They need more options though.
@Brick_Connections said:
"This is a pretty awesome idea. They need more options though."
Environment builds comes to mind....
This is so AWESOME.
I am from Denmark and just tried it my self. You can really make some awesome sets.
But as i can see on the page, there is a time stamp, that it will only be available until the november 2.
But i am sure tempted to buy this.
In the pay screen you get "Pay with PayPal"
When did that happen?!
We never had that option on the Australian version of Lego.com and still don't.
Do not buy often from Lego, but same here for me in denmark, that sure is new.
@iwybs said:
"So is this the way they're getting rid of old stock from sets that didn't sell very well? I doubt they would do any new production runs of these old vehicles and buildings."
3 of the buildings are brand new designs however (the Fire / Police / Picknick areas)
I would guess that they have every sub model pre-packed in its own bag, for ease of warehousing and packing. So it should theoretically be possible for them to do them if not individually then in a smaller box size.
I think it's a cool idea but variation in the types of buildings and vehicles will be important. More food stands/trucks! (I don't have space to collect a lot of Lego so I focus on food trucks, with a select few modulars).
From the FAQ on the page, they write that this is of cause a pilotproject and to cater to most people they have taken the theme of City to have as many different figures buildings and vehicles as possible.
But if this takes on and goes great, they might in the future do more theme, and make it available to more countries.
Interesting concept, but I guess its 'real world' potential will be rather limited. To make it more appealing - and elaborate away from just a bunch of sets and subthemes - it seems that it would add too much complexity to the process. Sorting, bagging particular pieces and/or subsets, custom box printing, boxing, shipping, etc... It seems too much trouble to what would eventually become an expensive option to regular sets hinging too heavily on the novelty of choosing the box contents and art.
It sure would be nice if they could really pull that off in a scalable, wider way, though...
so much potential, so poorly executed. Why wouldn't you just internally assign a fixed price to each selection, let people add as few or as many of the various options as they want, then tack on a scaled price for packaging/shipping. each selection should all be pre-bagged with the compatible instructions anyway, so it's just an assembly and boxing exercise.
the coding required to do that is incredibly simple. like insanely so. i don't get the thinking here.
I think they idea in it self is a good one. But maybe the Lego group, has some doubts in it, and hence only made it available in a small area. Both in terms of the theme, but also that it only is for Denmark.
But if anyone wants this, feel free to contact me, i could make you your chosen set and send it to you.
On Brickowl.com i have my own store "https://thesetstore.brickowl.com/"
Where i sell Lego, through that, i could sell these sets, and get payment trough paypal for example :-)
@Badgeroo said:
"In the pay screen you get "Pay with PayPal"
When did that happen?!
We never had that option on the Australian version of Lego.com and still don't. "
You can make Bricks & Pieces payments to LEGO UK through PayPal. I can’t recall when it started but it’s been a while.
Sweet I can get a police station. Thought for a minute they might overlook that.
Let me guess, after the total failure, that was 60271, they now just let the consumer mix random things together instead, without wasting to much time on it themselves.
Love the idea, but not the limited options. Some exclusivity partswise would surely increase sales - a tall-legged basketball player or celebrities; giraffe/koala/zebra/albatross/marmoset/st bernard dog; retro-buildings (or stickersheets for 1930s etc); and a cypress tree (obviously).
I honestly find this very underwhelming.
I do not understand how a company (TLG), is promoting a greener future and putting out more boxes...made from recycled or not material, this just does not make sense to me
I can get a cake stand AND a tuk-tuk???
Can I get nothing BUT cake stands and tuk-tuks? (and maybe a horse or two)
The sole problem I have is that LEGO's previous attempts at this didn't go too well.
And uh, LEGO now owns Bricklink. I can see this for gifting, but I can easily throw what I need together in Stud.io, get a parts list, and put the order in.
@dougts said:
"so much potential, so poorly executed. Why wouldn't you just internally assign a fixed price to each selection, let people add as few or as many of the various options as they want, then tack on a scaled price for packaging/shipping. each selection should all be pre-bagged with the compatible instructions anyway, so it's just an assembly and boxing exercise.
the coding required to do that is incredibly simple. like insanely so. i don't get the thinking here."
I'd say the thinking would be along the lines of "This is a pilot program, let's hear some feedback before we start to overcomplicate things." Beyond that, this looks more like it's supposed to be an opportunity for children to design their own set - within the confines of a predetermined budget - rather than be an adult builder's glorified parts pack.
I would love to get hold of that police station somehow...
@Lordmoral:
It's still going to look like the interior design was done by We've Been Robbed.
@paulrothwell:
What's this "on" you speak of?
@Badgeroo:
Must be a regional issue. We've been able to use Paypal in the US for a few years now. It's awesome. Back when I was using credit/debit cards to place orders, I'd sometimes have it choke on orders that had identical prices, like it thought I'd been double-billed for something. If that happened, it was a hassle to get things straightened out, because I think it would result in my card being temporarily deactivated. With Paypal, I never have that problem.
Great idea and hopefully rolled out further with more choices and such.
Also this is a good opportunity for TLG to get data on what is popular and what isn't from certain sets, there by being able to better design regular sets.
Interesting to see how this progresses.
@cody6268 said:
"And uh, LEGO now owns Bricklink. I can see this for gifting, but I can easily throw what I need together in Stud.io, get a parts list, and put the order in. "
Of course. Anyone can. But this appears to be for a different target audience like people looking for an individual gift in an official package, not a random parts mix from Bricklink.
Can I just get box full of lions? xD
Nearly 70 comments in, and noöne has complained about regional exclusives yet!
Are we witnessing a kinder, gentler community?
Or is that gang just biding their time, building up to a really big whine?
This definitely have potential! However if it is only possible to add one animal it is useless to me. Come on Lego surly the point of this must be that the customers can make their own set. If they want a set with only lions that should be possible, just put a fixed value on every "add on part" in the set and they can combine parts the way the like within the price-quota ;)
@Zander said:
" @mr_Fikou said:
"Can’t they just sell these submodels loose? Then you can choose for yourself how many you want to buy and you aren’t stuck to the 100 dollar price mark."
If LEGO were to sell each build/minifigure loose, there would be all sorts of additional costs: packaging, marketing, overstocking, understocking etc. Those costs can be minimised this way.
I do see your point though. Perhaps different box sizes to suit various price points: £15, £35, £80, £100 and £180.
And as already mentioned by posters above, across other themes: Castle, Ninjago, Friends, Space, or retro- or new sub-themes such as Space (Classic) and City (Zoo).
"
Maybe some other classic themes like power miners, rockraider, western (we need a good western theme again asap :D )
@bananaworld said:
"
Nearly 70 comments in, and noöne has complained about regional exclusives yet!
Are we witnessing a kinder, gentler community?
Or is that gang just biding their time, building up to a really big whine?"
I know you are being sarcastic, but indeed this is something very different from a regional exclusive. Hence no need to "whine".
@bananaworld said:
"
Nearly 70 comments in, and noöne has complained about regional exclusives yet!
Are we witnessing a kinder, gentler community?
Or is that gang just biding their time, building up to a really big whine?"
They're testing this out, not making it available to one place only
So you can have a bunch of random things in the same set.
But enough about 60271.
I like the idea - there’s always parts of large sets I want like the bank truck, or a nice telehandler but not the rest particularly. If the selection is large enough it would be a great way to get a nice mix of some of your favourite subsets
I'm guessing if you had chosen the fire station the box would have filled far quicker. I would be definitely interested if they offered the best parts from the previous town sets, e.g. the tram from 60097 city square, the sightseeing bus from 60026 , the crane and doughnut shop from 60233 , but I don't think that will happen as no-one will want the remaining builds!
@dougts said:
"so much potential, so poorly executed. Why wouldn't you just internally assign a fixed price to each selection, let people add as few or as many of the various options as they want, then tack on a scaled price for packaging/shipping. each selection should all be pre-bagged with the compatible instructions anyway, so it's just an assembly and boxing exercise.
the coding required to do that is incredibly simple. like insanely so. i don't get the thinking here."
Pretty simple... there is an additional cost to the custom packaging and printing. They need to make sure that they hit the proper revenue point for the item to bring a profit. If you let people just buy one small vehicle and a fig for ~$12, you’d end up losing money on the custom box and boxing costs.
Has anyone else noticed that some of these builds are reused from other sets?
The bank and police truck are taken from 60140 and the car, tuk-tuk, telehandler and food stand are from 60200.
The UI design makes it look like you can only choose one of each item. If it were possible to select multiple of each item then it seems like it may be a cost effective way to get a box full of minifigs to populate a LEGO city, or horses to build a ranch. I could also see children wanting two police cars to patrol their city, or two cake stands to compete for business on different sides of the street. And why not? Friendly competition is a part of learning through play.
I would absolutely design at least three sets based upon these offerings, and I'd be very tempted to gift them because they're quite unique and interesting.
It's certainly an interesting initiative. It's a shame that, currently, many of the vehicle, minifig and building choices revolve around emergency services and cops/robbers, although I tried my best to avoid them in the examples above. - Huw
How is that a shame? If your argument is because SOME cops have killed people. Then you are essentially disrespecting EVERY SINGLE police officer that lays their life on the line to help keep us safe. You don't realize just how stressful and hard it is to be a cop.
Only one helicopter to chose from? What if I want a fire helicopter, a police helicopter, and a construction helicopter? This would make it feel more like a typical large city set.
@jonwil said:
"I would love to get hold of that police station somehow...
"
Anything else in the set, i could buy it for you jonwil if it is :-P
I like the concept, but I think it's weird how existing elements from retired City sets show up as choices.
I think this shows us that TLG could have individual train cars for sale.
@SarumanTheWhite said:
"It's certainly an interesting initiative. It's a shame that, currently, many of the vehicle, minifig and building choices revolve around emergency services and cops/robbers, although I tried my best to avoid them in the examples above. - Huw
How is that a shame? If your argument is because SOME cops have killed people. Then you are essentially disrespecting EVERY SINGLE police officer that lays their life on the line to help keep us safe. You don't realize just how stressful and hard it is to be a cop.
"
You have the wrong end of the stick. It's not cops/robbers per se that I object to, just the quantity of Police sets that LEGO produces, and this could have been an opportunity to introduce something new to City.
However, I concede that Police and Fire sets are among LEGO's best sellers and always have a place in the product range.
@eleavitt200_ said:
"I like the concept, but I think it's weird how existing elements from retired City sets show up as choices.
I think this shows us that TLG could have individual train cars for sale. "
This, everything about it I agree with. Is it possible to mail this post to Lego HQ in a format with the words: "we want more trains, we beg you!" added underneath? I'm getting desperate for a My Own Train revival, but handled better. This seems like the perfect way to do it!
Get on it Lego!
@Monopoly said:
"Has anyone else noticed that some of these builds are reused from other sets?
The bank and police truck are taken from 60140 and the car, tuk-tuk, telehandler and food stand are from 60200."
Came to the same conclusion. The cargo-branded building with barrier is from 60169, right?
cool idea but seriosly lego cant keep the most items on stock or in stores like 501st cantina and a lot of other items, and now release an very custom set which requests more time and logistics to handle it ???
great idea for at the wrong time. same like lego dimensions AWESOME idea but couple years to early and to limited compare to animal crossing now in covid 19 times the game would be awesome on an switch and with added online feature , but like very very often in the past, LEGO missed the full potential.
I would love to see this expanded upon. One way I could think of improving it is instead of putting it in a printed box put it in one of those plastic classic tubs with no logo as a surprise gift option. Like CMFs on the next level.
@TheLegoFan:
Given the current social climate, I suspect that Western would be thema non grata.
@oceanone:
You got it backwards. Dimensions came out too late. Toys-to-life games in general were starting to wind down when everyone jumped on the bandwagon, bloating the market offerings for a dwindling customer base. They had a strict 3-year plan, and a major blow to that was the release of the Switch during the second year. You can't play Dimensions on the Switch. It's not because they never made a hub for it, but because the console is designed to convert to a portable handheld. To play the game, you'd need a portable hub, and you'd need to be able to haul all of the game pieces around with you, which really defeats the point of having a handheld portable console. If they'd released one year earlier, they would have been all or most of the way through Year 3 when people started abandoning the Wii U in favor of the Switch (the Wii U could be played as a handheld, but only in the presence of the actual console, so you could never stray too far from the hub and your collection of game pieces). As it is, that may have been a third of their market base who would be disconnecting the consoles that this game would run on in favor of one that it couldn't run on. Besides that, I don't know if it was possible to port your saved game data over to a different generation of console, so falling right on the tail end of an aging generation of hardware would just leave too many people looking at having to play through days on end just to get caught up, never mind however much was left to go before the game ended. Some of those speed challenges were nearly impossible to beat. One in particular could only be beaten with Aquaman's sub, as nothing else was fast enough underwater.
@PurpleDave , I enjoy reading your comments but please would you break up the paragraphs a bit to make it much easier to do so on screen, even if you wouldn't normally on paper.
In our articles, I try to make sure paragraphs are no longer than about 6 lines.
e.g.
You got it backwards. Dimensions came out too late. Toys-to-life games in general were starting to wind down when everyone jumped on the bandwagon, bloating the market offerings for a dwindling customer base.
They had a strict 3-year plan, and a major blow to that was the release of the Switch during the second year. You can't play Dimensions on the Switch. It's not because they never made a hub for it, but because the console is designed to convert to a portable handheld.
To play the game, you'd need a portable hub, and you'd need to be able to haul all of the game pieces around with you, which really defeats the point of having a handheld portable console. If they'd released one year earlier, they would have been all or most of the way through Year 3 when people started abandoning the Wii U in favor of the Switch (the Wii U could be played as a handheld, but only in the presence of the actual console, so you could never stray too far from the hub and your collection of game pieces).
As it is, that may have been a third of their market base who would be disconnecting the consoles that this game would run on in favor of one that it couldn't run on. Besides that, I don't know if it was possible to port your saved game data over to a different generation of console, so falling right on the tail end of an aging generation of hardware would just leave too many people looking at having to play through days on end just to get caught up, never mind however much was left to go before the game ended.
Some of those speed challenges were nearly impossible to beat. One in particular could only be beaten with Aquaman's sub, as nothing else was fast enough underwater.
LEGO Factory in a new way.