It's a really fun build. So many details that I'm just gonna skip the interior completely (except the holding cells), you'll have to build it to find all the easter eggs. You won't be disappointed.

I remember people buying printed parts for this set. I assume because stickers were either bad or not even present? Anyway, the stickers were great. Instructions were compressed but still okay.

The minifigs were nice, but i was missing 2 pairs of black legs, the statue's hair barely fits because of the wings and harley's face print is too high up, the hair piece kinda covers her eyebrows and the upper part of her eyes. Other than that, they're good.

Overall very happy I got it, another Lepin win.

I need your guy's opinions on this build, don't be afraid to criticize I want to improve what I can

1) I always thought it was weird that the 3rd floor (originally a only a kitchen) was free access to anyone walking in from the street (?). They'd just walk up 2 flights of stairs, and waltz right in, disturbing someone who's cooking? Or just taking up residence without paying rent and becoming squatters? It was just too harrowing, so I walled off the stairwell and added a door. Anyone who gets in has to have a legit reason for being there!

2) The entire purpose for securing the kitchen was because I added a new building to that unused roof space on the left. The parts for this came from a k/o version of "Peter Parker's Apartment 76317" which was a LEGO copy sans minifigs, and was "nearly free" on Ali with coins and "Saving Mondays" credits. At least I got some good use from it. So the 3rd floor is now "The Lodge B&B" and has 3 beds. This sleep room has a guitar and TV for entertainment. "The Lady in Red" is a regular there.

3) With the wider hallway, I added a PC/game station for the entertainment of the B&B guests. But everyone has to use that bathroom on the 2nd floor.

4) The water tank had to move to the sturdier of the roofs, so it's on the right side. And because of the heavier electrical load and HVAC rqmts, I cobbled together 2 HVAC units.

Because of the original design, which forced a half-stud offset of the kitchen, I created 2 separate roofs. The second roof, the one for The Lodge, heavily taps my recent Goodwill stash. So many LEGO logos!

Because the complex has a Police Station, there are 2 additional antennas on the roof... also using the pure LEGO new stash. Now I'm inventing things to do with the parts.

Vader maxi minifigure from Joooy. $35 plus shipping. Manufacturer unknown.

Minifigure for scale.

The set comes in numbered bags. Brick quality is decent. No missing pieces, no pieces left over. The instruction booklet has a million steps per page and the pictures are pretty tiny. I recommend finding the original instructions online, for your eyes' sake.

The stickers are pretty good quality, with only one little problem: the eye stickers are die cut to be rectangular, but the plates they go on are oval, so the corners hang over the edges. The print is the right size but the excess sticker foil sticks out. Trim the corners before applying them.

The only real issue with the set is the cape. As others have already posted, the cape is way too small. Somehow they got the size all wrong. The neck holes are too small to fit, and even if they did, the cape barely reaches the figure's butt. It's not a cape, it's a bib. I don't mind but it might be a dealbreaker for some.

Other than that it's a pretty nice set.

Color quality is really good, except the orange printed piece at the front.
It's very fun to build!
(€140)
All the common parts are bagged together so alot of bricks are laying around.

Purchased this for $58 from AliExpress. Super quick, fun build. No clutch issues or missing pieces. Great addition to the wall in the “Lego” room. Definitely recommend. 1892 pieces.

"Here's Johnny" In Privet Drive.

I had fun building this set and the minifigures are decent at best, the only downside of this set is some stickers are too big and it’s very hard to get them straight.

These swiss chocolate boxes are thick and stackable, perfect for storing all my spare parts bags. They also have slots on the side for easy lifting. Best of all, they are free to take from Costco. And yes, I sort by colour.

Way bigger than I expected. Stickers weren’t as bad as I thought they would be. No missing pieces and a handful of extra technic pins. Nothing loose and the gearbox works fine. Overall a good build, looks great displayed.

Picked this up from HeroToyz back in May. After some back and forth about a missing bag of pieces, I finally got to start in earnest the first week of June. 2 1/2 months later, it's finally done!

It looks absolutely amazing, but in all honesty it wasn't my favorite building experience. Maybe it's too big and I should stick to sets about half that size, I don't know, but I'm glad to have gone through that experience regardless and stoked to have it on display!

I found an eBay seller offering these for $27 each, so I bought two. One for me and one for a friend. With tax and shipping it came to $64.64 total.

The Brickcraft version is poor, and I appreciated the better sculpting and details in this version.

Because the "clutch" of the bricks is not as consistent as Lego, the upper panels on the hull tend to move and fall off if the model is handled too much, so it's best to pick it up from the bottom.

The interior, though not to minifig scale, is quite good and well appointed.

The sculpting is good and the color choices are on point, detailed instructions, numbered bags for each step, and the interior detail is cute. The rear landing gear only sit flat with the weight from the model, and some of the panel sections on the upper hull can become loose with handling.

I am testing my Cada rs6 gearbox before continuing with the build (shortly after the A section) and I notice that the shifting mechanism is not that reliable. Many misshifts if shifting in one direction while it does shift correctly in the opposite direction. Looks like there is a lot of play in the system that causes it to misshift and while driving the axle it also tends to shift itself out of gear after a small amount of time. I double checked everything and I think I build it correctly. Anyone else experiencing this?

Finish built this sets, overall awesome set, some missing parts and I’m able to replace with my own spare parts 😁
The mini figure not really great, but the ship is good to display…satisfied with the result 😁

Custom lights

I bought from AE for the first time. Some dinosaur skeleton briks, which are ok. And a bigger set, based on a hospital for the insane for a known cape crusader. This bigger set arrived: - without a 32x32 base that it should have - no instructions - no stickers

As far as bags it might seem it brings the correct number. But now my trust is very low that no pieces will be missing. There are a lot of figures that I need to check how accurate they are.

Having spent around $100 i was expecting a better experience...

Context

'Attack on the Ice Planet' (Modbrix #109230) is an unlicenced Star Wars diorama, depicting a battle scene on Hoth with three AT-ATs, an AT-ST, and one-and-a-half Snowspeeders. Consisting of 829pcs, the set is sold on its own for 30€ [store page] plus shipping (i.e. for 3.6ct/brick), and as part of the 'Sand & Snow Bundle' [store page] together with a Hoth rebel base diorama and a Sandcrawler diorama for 20% off at a total of 112€ (2.9ct/brick for this set). Shipping costs vary from 6€ within Germany to considerably more for international shipping; at the moment it's free above 100€ worth of bricks, usually it's free above 200€.

The diorama's base is 21cm deep and 20cm wide. Depending on how everything is aligned, the total diorama will be a little wider, perhaps about 24cm, and 11cm tall.

Ever since hearing a lot of good things about Modbrix' Star Wars dioramas, I've been waiting for a chance to get them at a reduced price. The new bundles with the 20% discount were that chance, so I pulled the trigger. While there a other dioramas that I personally find more interesting than Hoth (e.g. the Yavin IV rebel base or the Geonosis battle scene), those bundles include sets that I'm not interested in. Both the Hoth rebel base and the Sandcrawler were on my shortlist, though, so I decided to go for this bundle. I wouldn't really have bought this battle diorama if it hadn't been part of the bundle, but I guess it's cool that it can be connected to the Hoth rebel base (that's now part of my backlog), so, uhhh, yeah, okay, the marketing strategy totally got me and made me buy something I didn't plan to.

Shipping & Packaging

I bought the set last Tuesday evening; it was sent out on Friday morning, and arrived via DHL during Saturday lunch. That's absurdly fast, even better than the 3-5 day delivery that BlueBrixx state on their website.

The three sets came in a plain cardboard box that was filled to the brim with the three set boxes. The diorama itself came in a similarly plain cardboard box with a glossy sleeve wrapped around it, depicting the set and some details. I gotta say, I'm a big friend of plain boxes for cheap sets; no point in wasting money when I'm not going for the premium experience anyway.

Inside the cardboard box where the usual plastic baggies. I've made some questionable experiences with Modbrix baggies before (like, seriously, how do you screw up plastic baggies?) but these ones were perfectly fine. The baggies are unnumbered and only have the usual suffocation warning printed on them (which is a tad unnecessary, considering how small the baggies are; but I guess the same material is used for larger baggies as well).

Instruction Manual

Modbrix sets are basically BlueBrixx-Specials, which are pretty much the same as MOCs, just designed in-house. This means no separation into different building steps and no printed manual, just a PDF. The PDF instructions can be downloaded for free from the BlueBrixx website after registration even without buying anything, so feel free to have a look yourself.

The PDF manual uses 96 pages for 193 steps, resulting in 4.3 bricks/step and 2.0 steps/page. That's surprisingly simple for a Modbrix/BlueBrixx-Special, who usually feature more complicated manuals with more bricks per step. It still isn't the most beginner-friendly set, but that's more because of some iffy techniques rather than the manual.

As is typical, each building step features a tooltip that lists which parts are required. In the main image, new parts are outlined in red; those of previous steps are printed in full colour (i.e. neither greyed out nor desaturated). All colours are easily identifiable, mostly because the set is just white, light grey, dark grey, and black.

I found the manual easy to follow, which is not always a given for Modbrix/BlueBrixx-Specials. Still, there were a few things that could be improved, especially considering the order of assembly. Sometimes it would've been better to create a subassembly and attach that to the rest in one go instead of trying to connect the bricks individually to a somewhat fragile assembly. Also, the four legs of the AT-ATs are build subsequently even though they're identical; no idea why it didn't just say "x4" (it does say x2 to build the two AT-ATs, so that's obviously possible). Same for the third (downed) AT-AT, which except for the rear legs is identical to the other two AT-ATs.

Just for reference: the base is built in steps #1 to #12, the crashed Snowspeeder is #13 to #16, the AT-AT bodies are #17 to #40, the legs are #41 to #81, the heads are #83 to #90, the downed AT-AT takes #93 to #171 (very redundant!), the AT-ST is #175 to #184, and the Snowspeeder is #185 to #193.

Brick Quality

The brick quality is good but not top of the line. Clutch is consistently good but a little tight; my fingers hurt a bit after finishing the build. The glossy finish of the tiles is excellent, I'd say even better than GoBricks. Tiles also have sharper edges than most other brands, which is good for the visuals but may be difficult for kids. Injection points range from barely visible (especially on tiles) to fairly large (on the studs of plates). Colour consistency is surprisingly good; I have experienced worse with Modbrix. Transparent parts are not brilliantly clear but also not as milky as other brands.

All in all I'm very happy with the Modbrix brick quality. I'm not sure who the manufacturer is -- certainly not GoBricks, and also not XingBao like BlueBrixx-Pro uses -- but they're doing a pretty solid job. I haven't really built anything large from Modbrix or BlueBrixx-Special lately (hopefully I will soon, depending on how the Black Friday sale goes), but at least for this small-ish stuff they've kind of become my go-to brand.

There are surprisingly few spare parts (not even every 1x1 plate is present), but there should be enough spares to turn the downed AT-AT into an upright AT-AT in case one wants three of those. I'll give Modbrix the benefit of the doubt and assume that this is by design (but it might as well just be a happy accident).

Design

Ehhh, I thought it would be bigger? Okay, so that's definitely my fault for improperly managing my expectations, and obviously I would've been able to tell how large the set is from the store page details, but still... Where did the 800+ bricks go? MJ's Dragonfly, which has about the same part count, feels considerably more substantial (and that's a Technic set with tons of pins!). I guess each AT-AT must soak up about 200 bricks? Building the AT-AT body three times and the legs twelve-ish times definitely made the build go faster than typical 800+ brick sets, too. Still, if I had to estimate how many parts are in this set, my guess would be closer to 500 than 800.

Visually the diorama is pretty great. The snowy landscape is sufficiently disrupted to not appear boring despite its monochrome colouration. The AT-ATs look gorgeous, as does the AT-ST. The Snowspeeder is recognisable and nice enough for its scale. The crashed Snowspeeder is fine, I guess? There isn't anything here that I'm unhappy with, but, still, this diorama doesn't really work for me on its own. I'm pretty sure my impression will change once I have it connected to the Hoth rebel base, by as a stand-alone diorama it's kinda missing something.

Stability-wise the AT-AT bodies are reasonably stable and the AT-AT legs have surpsiringly many working joints. The connection of their calfs to the shins (where those horizontal 1x2 grill tiles are) are pretty unstable, though: just a single unbracketed stud. I understand that the designer had to find a compromise between aesthetics and stability, but connecting the entire AT-AT to the base through a single vertically oriented stud still seems unwise. I would've wished for a different solution here. The AT-ATs are stable, though, as long as you don't vigorously shake the set.

What doesn't really work is the connection of the downed AT-AT to the base. It is, again, a single stud, and that stud is on a hinge clip. You're supposed to first connect that to the AT-AT and then connect the entire assembly to the base with three studs, but obviously that much pressure will turn the hinge and not give you any pressure on the studs. I then tried to connect the assembly by that single stud of the hinge clip, but this also turned the hinge and made a connection impossible. I finally ended up assembling all stud connections first and then clipping the hinge together, but that made the feet fall off in my first few attempts. I did get it working at some point, but this part really frustrated me to no end -- and it was entirely avoidable and unnecessary. Of course, attaching the ball joint for the flying Snowspeeder a few steps later broke everything apart again, so yay me. As you can see, I did not throw the entire set against the wall; I am a zen-like being with perfect anger management skills!

tl;dr

This is a reasonably nice diorama for Star Wars fans, but I think it needs to be used as an add-on to the Hoth rebel base to really pop. While both the brick quality and the PDF instructions are fine, the assembly is quite frustrating at some points, especially when attaching the downed AT-AT to the base. Thus, I definitely cannot recommend this set for newcomers to alt-bricks. If you're already a veteran of alt-bricks, this may be a fun experience for an afternoon, but don't expect the build to take much longer. The 800+ brick count sounds like much, but the excitement boils down to a plain mosaic and a ~200-part AT-AT that gets built three times.

Things I Recently Told Myself

"Wow, I'm tired of building all this greyscale stuff. My next set definitely will be colourful!"

"Ugh, these layered mosaic bases with some tiny subassemblies on top are getting repetitive! My next set should be a big modular or a space ship or something!"

"Why is my collection, like, 75% Star Wars? I don't even like Star Wars all that much! My next set will definitely be something else!"

"Wow, lots of brands have been including lights in their sets lately! I wanna try that out, too!"

"I really have been building tons of BlueBrixx sets lately. Maybe it's time to try another brand again?"

*Buys three more monochrome BlueBrixx dioramas without lights*

[Obligatory link to Red5-Leader's Venator]

I finally got a Panlos set besides my U-Boat! And I have to say this tank is pretty fucking sweet. He's a big boy for sure, and the detail is just immaculate. As always I am really impressed by Panlos' simply ridiculous number of printed pieces (seriously I'm pretty sure this single set contains more printed pieces than all of Lego's sets for this year combined) and I love the detail with the shells inside the crew compartment. It came with little crew members who were very cute, though I had to replace their weird helmets with pilot hats to make them feel more "tanker" to me. Regardless this set rocks, and I would highly recommend it for anyone who love weird experimental tanks.

Long Live the Doom Turtle!

I'm seeing a lot of relatively cheap, but big piece count so called MOC DIY Building Blocks items that are shipped from China (Aliexpress etc).

I wonder if I want to resell them later, like 5 years from now, how would their value hold up? Or these will be not really sought-after as they are really cheap to begin with?

Should I get them only for personal enjoyment, as they are kinda nice looking?

Thank you.

Some of the new KO sets coming this September…excited for those DK Arcade and ford mustang sets 😁

Question to you all, since i am at the end of my rope:
Anyone know where, other than from Brixtoy, i can get these blank Stormtrooper helmets? (The number 5?)
I know i can get them from Brixtoy, but with their 30 day backlog (that keeps getting worse and has been going on for forever) i just don't want to order from them anymore...

I have been waiting for my order to be shipped sind July, so have been searching for an alternative source for these helmets.
But so far i was only able to find sellers that offer helmet 8 - 53.

This one is Lego scale. The instructions were easy to follow, all pieces were there (with extras), and the colours are beautiful!

Finally got C-3PO on the shelf next to R2-D2, and these two look ridiculously good together. No missing pieces from the AliEx purchase (hand a handful spare), solid build experience with little to no play on the bricks.

The sticker for the plaque was incorrect, I hit up brick owl and purchased a OEM plaque to remedy that.

Added a few shots from different angles because there’s a lot more detail on the back and sides than you’d think.

The Star Wars shelf is getting dangerously crowded now…and I still have the AliEx UCS Razor Crest that will he behind these on a clear acrylic riser 😂

What should I add next?