Creator Set | SerialBuilder | Pre-order update #6

Confirm your shipping addresses!

I hope you’re all having a great start to the new year and are all getting ready for a bunch of building in the coming months.

To start this update, I’d like to quickly cover a few important things that we need from you all, just so it’s up top and clear for everyone. Then we can continue with the update itself.

Critical Update

When will we ship?

The sets are currently being produced and so we’re gearing up to start shipping out the sets hopefully by the end of the month. We don’t have a definitive date just yet, but we’re not far off now.

Please check your shipping address

We’re preparing to pass over the list of shipping addresses to our shipping partner, so we need everyone to check to make sure that your addresses are correct. You can find the address you’ve entered in your dashboard.

You can find your address on your pre-order card here.

If there’s an error, please reach out to us immediately and we’ll get it corrected.

No charge, no reserved spot

This last one only applies to a handful of you who have yet to have your cards charged. I’ve tried reaching out through email but am trying out this channel too. We’ve recently dropped to less than 5% of stock remaining, so we will need to start freeing up your slot for other customers who may be waiting once we completely run out. If you’d like to keep your reservation, please go through the ‘Confirm Payment’ route in the dashboard to charge your card before 23rd Jan. After this, we can no longer guarantee your reservation. If you’re unsure about whether your pre-order is confirmed, as long as you have a “Paid” status, you’re all good.

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Not-so-critical Update

That’s it for the critical announcements, let’s get on to the meaty bits.

Why are we so busy?

The reason for this is because we’ve been sifting through a (Thunder)jaw-dropping 21,970 parts in our excel sheets to make sure they’re properly accounted for on the factory side. To give you an idea of the complexity and a bit of insight into the world of lego part numbers, there is a whole system for identifying parts because they each have a part number and a colour ID. The factory has their own system for part numbers and colours which are different, so that’s a fun problem to deal with. On top of that, lego parts can sometimes have different numbers for what seem like the same part, due to minor revisions or updates to the molds. It’s enough to make me want to saw-my-tooth out. There have been initiatives to try and standardise the mess that is lego part numbers in the form of the databases like the ones found on BrickLink and Rebrickable, but these then sometimes add their own numbers and colour IDs.

source: XKCD

This is just another quirk of sourcing for parts, and it can become quite overwhelming for the average customer to go through and sort this out for themselves. This is precisely why we’re stepping in to change the way this is done and to make it more accessible to everyone.

What we’re doing internally is developing a way to connect everything up together so that ordering parts becomes more automated and robust. It’ll take a bit of time, but we should eventually be able to get sets out faster and with less manual checking required in the future.

Speaking of automation…

It’s not much to look at, but the amount of time it saves us makes it the real MVP

We’ve built some custom software to allow us to organise the parts into bags in sequential order according to the builds. In doing so, we’re levelling up the build experience for building MOCs as you no longer need to search for the parts in a huge pile of parts, as sections are now more isolated. It’s a bit of a (Tremor)task to update the build instructions accordingly, but this change is a huge quality of life fix so we’re putting in the work so you don’t have to.

Packaging has been finalised

Unfortunately, due to time, this was one thing that we had to compromise a little on in the sense that we only Grazed the surface of all the options we wanted to explore. We decided to submit what we think is a fairly unique packaging design that we hope you’ll all appreciate somewhat. Just know that the majority of the effort went into the builds instead.

It’s essentially this all over - RIP everybody’s eyes when you get the final package

For those who were asking about the size of the box for the Complete Edition, it’s roughly W540mm x H450mm x D350mm.

A real pain in the (Tall)neck

We made 2 fixes for the Tallneck, one minor and one major - here they are for your viewing pleasure.

Minor Fix

Them toes ain’t going anywhere

I really do love the way the feet of the Tallneck are designed and how it integrates into the base to provide much needed support for the whole build. To create the collection of toes, Nik uses a flexible tube to wrap around, to which the toes are attached - it’s a really clever technique. When testing the build however, I found that for the tube to stay put when clipped in, you needed to pre-bend the tube to give it a curvature so that it doesn’t just want to pry away when it’s attached. We had the toe assembly pop out a few too many times during the build process (once they are built, the tube tends to conform to its new shape and stays put, but this takes a while). We felt it was annoying enough to warrant a really small fix that keeps the toes in place a lot more sturdily allowing you to build without ever having to worry about them popping out.

Major Fix

The supervisor be supervising

We updated the flexing internal structure of the neck to be a bit more rigid. The thing with stiffening up certain parts of a build is that those forces then get transferred to weaker sections which is where new failure points occur. I have to say that doing a retroactive fix here was certainly not easy since specific points and features needed to exist for the beast’s panels to be placed on. But I’m happy to report that the updated version is sturdier and all the features remain intact. On the outside, you can’t really even tell that there’s been a change, even though that change is quite significant.

Everyone has that one person in their lives that they just want to strangle sometimes

We would highly advise against treating it this roughly at home. Be kind to your Tallneck

What about that elusive Thunderjaw?

At this rate we may as well call it Redmaw since these fixes are so often mentioned but not seen. They’re coming, just need the time to document them and also leave something for the next update.

A wild Clement appears!

We’ve officially made our first hire! Meet Clement, our in-house builder who will be responsible for helping to build and tests sets for improvements but also to help develop completely new builds.

Too shy - maybe you’ll catch him next time on one of Sean’s videos

A man of few words, but yet has a lot to say. He’s a Nintendo fanboy and is particularly fond of the Pokémon universe, and will buy anything Pokémon related, except the new Lego set, because it’s too expensive sold out.

Clement and I worked together as a duo developing our many helmets at Lumos and he shares my relentless pursuit of high quality products. Watch this space as we’ll be teasing his first build from an entirely new theme soon!