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Comment by handrous | Hacker News Reader

IIRC they switched to some kind of biodegradable plastic a few years back. I'm pretty sure they're softer, but it might be in my head.

What'd help way more with waste is if they would stop making like 75% of the part count of modern sets short 1x1s and other really tiny—often flat-topped, because the box photo mustn't display any nubs, I guess—pieces. If my kids take some legos outside, those are what get lost permanently. I get them to pick up what I can, and make a pass myself for any they missed, because as toys go they're gold, but some of those tiny pieces are for-sure buried in my yard.

That'd also make the sets more playable—repairing play-induced damage on a modern set is hell because of the fiddly little constructions they use, and there are few exposed nubs to connect things to for expanding/customizing/having-minifigs-stand-on-it, without tearing off a bunch of pieces.

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I'm personally fine with the term nubs and know exactly what you mean.

In some AFOL circles, they'll jump down your throat for not using the "correct" term "stud". The canonical term for the "flat-topped" is tile.

My personal gripe is just the explosion of special purpose pieces that Lego vends today. Less is more Lego.

Ah, cool, thanks for the corrections. Yeah, I'm not into online lego fandom enough to know the correct terms—I just played with them for probably low-thousands of hours as a kid.

I do like how many bigger modern sets come with a "brick tool". I always wanted one as a kid when, but they were a separate purchase and I never wanted one bad enough for it to make my wishlists, over more sets. Even the $80+ sets (in 80s/90s dollars!) back then didn't come with them. They are handy.

> My personal gripe is just the explosion of special purpose pieces that Lego vends today. Less is more Lego.

I've personally been amazed at the possibilities that seemingly single-purpose parts open up in the hands of a skilled builder.

One example is the "stud shooter" -- a utensil for minifigures to shoot out 1x1 round plates. Check out what these folks did with it:

https://www.newelementary.com/2020/05/stud-shooter-15391%20-...

New Elementary is a gold mine for creative uses for "specialized" parts.

> I've personally been amazed at the possibilities that seemingly single-purpose parts open up in the hands of a skilled builder.

And this is great, but when you have small children who just want to join things together, a lot of the modern sets have a fairly limited ability to customise.

It’s frustrating. They sell plenty of simple sets, it’s just so attractive to buy the fancy ones recreating some movie.

Wow - amazing link. Thanks!

My son did exactly that with all his 'specialized' pieces. The way he repurposed those in his own designs used to crack me up, and he was doing that when he was only eight or ten years old. The imagination didn't fixate on what the part was originally used for, he only saw it as a raw shape to serve some purpose.

> My personal gripe is just the explosion of special purpose pieces that Lego vends today. Less is more Lego.

Lego has significantly reduced the number of special purpose pieces it uses since the 90's. Back then, the number of specialized one-off pieces Lego was using helped nearly sink the company. That's partially responsible for the increase in the number of small parts they use now -- it allows them to recreate some of the intricacy you could have with an equivalent larger piece.

A lot of the weird/specialized pieces Lego puts out these days are minifigure-related in some way.

The new bioplastic is only used on flexible parts like vegetation. Most bricks are still made from ABS (although they're continuing to prototype other plastics)

It's also not biodegradable; it's chemically identical to the polyethylene used before. It's only the process and materials sourcing that changed.

Hey, random question from someone who isn't a parent, do you have any read on whether home 3D printed legos are cool to kids? I guess it's hard to match the look and 3D print the majority of your pieces while buying special boxed sets that your child wants.

I walked past a lot of Legos last week and I was thinking "these are very cool, but wow my parents spent so much money on legos". I also used to paint some of the Games Workshop Warhammer figurines in my teens. If I ever had the urge to get back into something like Legos or figurines later in life, I think I'd definitely go the 3D printing route.

Look into bulk used LEGOs from online stores, it's probably cheaper than printing your own and helps reuse existing plastic parts.

3D printing is awesome for figurines! Although they're banned at official Games Workshop events, it's one of the best ways to casually play 40K IMO.

Fair point about reusing the existing legos!

Great to hear that about 40k - I'm fine avoiding the official events, I mostly enjoyed the painting and exploring the universe with my friend. Would love to have a full army in the future without having to pay a few grand! [I know you can buy used armies online, but then you don't get to put it together!]

3D printing is great for a lot of little plastic toys but it also teaches you about the mechanical perfection that is Lego. Even the cheap offbrand bricks probably fit more consistently than what you can print.

not exactly, i have been printing FFF parts with a tolerance of 50 microns with a .25mm nozzle. it all has to do with part design and quality filament.

1) Seconding used as an option from the other post. That's great.

2) Big Buckets of legos still exist and are pretty cheap, actually.

3) Kids may like the sets on the shelf but my kids have treated them like puzzles: they're really excited when they get them and put them together once, play with them barely if at all, then as soon as they get a little messed up, just destroy them and go back to making whatever, and never put them together again. I've seen very few modern sets (but there are a few!) that look like they'd support the play-style I had as a kid. Even the "big" sets with huge part counts are tiny compared to large 90s sets, and have rooms and such that are almost too small even for kid-hands to play in, plus the aforementioned problems with so many of the pieces being tiny, so much of the construction being really fiddly (relying on all those tiny pieces) rather than straightforward so it's hard to fix if part of it gets broken, or you deliberately disassemble part of it for some reason. Few exposed studs plus the fiddly-construction thing makes expansion/customization and "kit-bashing" tougher, which was a big part of what I did. I suppose the modern ones appeal really well to kids who like to assemble lego sets, then display them, rather than playing with them. I knew a few kids like when I was a kid.

I don't know whether 3d printed lego replacements are any good.

3D printing, at least typical FDM, does not have near the tolerances required to snap onto the real bricks, but I found that the “LEGO technics” side of things (with the pegs and holes) is much more forgiving since the real lego pegs are flexible, they can snap into rigid 3D printed parts once you get the scale right.

Years ago I was teaching a robotics class where I asked the kids to customize their robots’ faces by drawing new parts like mustaches and eyebrows with markers, and then used Inkscape and Tinkercad to model the parts in 3D. If you scroll down to the last pics in my blog you can see the result: https://coltenj.com/learning-with-social-emotional-robots/

It doesn’t have the tolerances to create bricks that play at all like real Lego, but it’s not that hard to make parts that will snap onto real bricks or to offer studs onto which the real parts can snap.

I’ve made many a custom kids’ name tags as parts that can plug into Lego bricks. No one thinks they plug as nicely, but Lego doesn’t have the kids’ names either, so…

This is a good answer. As a kid there were always ideas that I wanted to build, but I would for example not be able to construct the shape required in the working space that I had.

For example pieces like angle switchers, mixing holes for axles with other pieces, parts that allow things to slide etc.

When my 6yo saw the custom jetpack for figurines I made on an SLA printer, his eyes got wide. I think it was half because it was a piece he had only imagined, and half because he thought now he could have all the Lego he wanted for free. Ultimately his imagination does a lot of the work so custom parts aren’t that important. But the SLA printer ($200 AnyCubic) can make snappable bricks.

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