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Comment by pbronez | Hacker News Reader

I love LEGO and have recently gotten back into it with my kids. There are tons of wonderful sets to choose from and the designs are much more realistic than they were when I was growing up. BUT... I've consistently had pieces missing from new sets! It's not catastrophic. Usually it's just one piece and I can substitute in another from my collection, though often the wrong color.

Lego will send you replacements if you ask them, but that's a pain. Especially since something is deeply broken with my LEGO ID and I can't get into their stupid website.

It's not enough to make me stop buying the sets, but it kills the fun when my kid works hard on a set and can't finish it because of a manufacturing error.

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we've purchased at least 40-50 lego sets in the past three years and there has never been a piece truly missing. This includes several really big sets like the Harry Potter Castle (~6000 pieces), Big Ben (~4000 pieces, though this is not as recent of a kit), the saturn V rocket (1969 pieces), two different space shuttles, and many many of the more consumer-level kits, many of them very recent, with no end of spiderman (at least 8 spiderman-related kits), star wars (at least 10-12 star wars related kits), super mario world kits, lego motorized trains, at least three separate commerical jetliner-related kits, two or three helicopteres, frozen/little mermaid/moana etc, minions, etc. our house is totally taken over by many thousands of dollars in legos all over the place.

through all of this, there has never been one single piece missing, ever. which is kind of mind blowing.

What usually happens when a piece is "missing" is, we used the piece incorrectly in another spot - this takes some detective work some kind, but it always turns up, there's the piece! none ever missing, ever.

once the things are built and our 7 year old takes complete charge of them, then we lose pieces like crazy.

Not sure if my kids have that many sets yet (they basically just want Legos for every present so we'll be there soon), but I can definitely relate to this. Every set there is a "missing" piece that they ask me about, but it is always either found in the wrong spot or on the floor somewhere. It is to the point now that they tell me a piece is missing, I give them the look, and then they go back and find it on their own.

we've had a few issues with missing pieces but it's usually a color problem: extra red brick, one less white brick. There's roughly the same weight of contents but not the exact item.

A bigger issue is the reliability. some pieces have been broken in the bag, specifically longer flat plates. other pieces literally crumbled upon assembly, specifically low-grade sloping pieces near the edge. doubt these pieces will last as long as the pieces from 10 years ago

The plastic formulation for some Lego factories is not up to spec, this has resulted in a very large number of complaints. For instance, it isn't rare at all to see brand new 1x1's and minifig bodies that are cracked on one side just by building the set and letting it sit, which in the past really would have never ever happened.

I recently got the Fender Strat kit and I thought I was missing a few pieces but it turned out I was using the wrong color. The amp is made of a lot of gray pieces with various shades between them. The problem is that the instructions are printed on that glossy paper that doesn't really use the exact color of the brick so a direct comparison is impossible. For sets with very distinct colors, it's fine, but because this one had 3 different shades of gray, it was hard to tell which was which, especially when you factor in taking a day off in between building times.

My Saturn V was "missing" 2 pieces and I even went to a Lego store in the mall and was given some replacements. Turns out they were stuck by static to the bag they came in. Luckily I hoard the bags in the box the set came in for no good reason so the missing pieces turned up.

Much later I decided to rearrange the letters near the bottom of the first stage and I got 4 spare S pieces from the missing pieces website Lego has.

> and the designs are much more realistic than they were when I was growing up

That's one thing I don't much care for in the modern sets. Sure the results look more realistic, but it means that half the pieces are now custom made for the particular set, and often have very little use in a general context. It seems that they've moved from a general building system to more of a per set focused approach.

When I was a kid I loved specialized pieces and often re-used them to add flair or distinct touches to my own creation. Having alternatives to rectangles is great!

I don't see what all the fuss is about, it doesn't seem either/or to me. The days of off the shelf models having enough general purpose 2x4 or whatever bricks to build totally arbitrary large structures have been gone for at least 30 years, but nothing really seems to be stopping mixing and matching and getting basic blocks for the backbone of a collection. They've just added the existence of $TEXAS display pieces with unique stuff.

I even accidentally got some pieces stuck together in ways that required screwdrivers or pliers to get them out. No big deal!

I am not too familiar with the current day sets, but around the early 2000s they started pushing the branded movie tie in sets really hard and I do remember seeing sets where a "piece" was essentially half a tie fighter wing and had no real reasonable reusability. I have heard they have pulled back on this almost entirely.

I would agree though that some specialized pieces are fine. My memories from the early 90s were probably the best balance from my time using Legos. By the mid-late 90s the castle and pirate sets did start moving into imho overly specialized pieces which then lead to the 2000s nadir.

Yeah, I suppose the lego "tree" (spruce?) is a great example of a very specialised piece that's fondly remembered.

I agree. My son is just getting into Lego, and I find I'm avoiding most of the newer sets in favor of decent-condition used vintage sets, simply because what he enjoys is having enough general pieces to create and imagine new things.

Are you sure they're custom made? My impression was that LEGO rarely does custom pieces (beyond things like printing known character faces or logos onto existing pieces). It's just that they've been making these sets for so long that they have a large catalogue of rare pieces to draw from.

I've bought a bunch of LEGO during the pandemic and I very rarely see pieces that are only present in one set (and when I do they are mostly printed pieces, or standard shapes with unusual colors). I think that what makes the models more "realistic" aren't custom pieces, it's smaller pieces. A lot of models have a lot of 1x1 square, circle or quarter-circle tiles, or small slanted pieces, which allows for finer details. At the same time, these pieces are often smooth on top, so they are less composable than studded ones and harder to manipulate, especially for children, so I can see how this could be a problem.

There are also a lot more colors and shades than there used to be, so it is a little harder to make substantial custom constructions that don't look like rainbows.

> it means that half the pieces are now custom made for the particular set

I do not believe this is true. There are Lego enthusiasts that thoroughly review every new set and are careful to point out the introduction of new pieces and new building techniques. The number of new pieces per set is very low, and even then the pieces are typically well received for the number of new build techniques they may open up.

It's a shame that this is still the perception because this actually was a real issue for a while in the early 2000s. Back then lego was losing money and was not as successful as it had been in the past.

Then lego seriously addressed this problem and since then have made a large effort to avoid having unique parts in sets. And they were incentivised to do so, because the more unique parts you have, the more money it is going to cost you. Reusing parts is just simply a lot cheaper.

Now there still often are unique parts in a lot of sets, but they are usually unique only in colour or printing.

For example, the current set with the record for the number of unique parts is the Diagon Alley set.

Here is the list of unique parts in the set: https://brickset.com/inventories/75978-1/unique

The thing you will note is that even though there are a lot of parts that only appear in this set, I wouldn't say that these parts are not useful generally. They are mostly just bits of custom lego characters, which you would happily use in any context, or a custom colour for a generally applicable part.

Well for example, my son got this for a present a while back: https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/catamaran-42105

And just looking at others on the site:

https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/lamborghini-sian-fkp-37-4... https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/ford-mustang-shelby-gt500... https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/monster-jam-megalodon-421...

Really? I’ve put a ton of sets together over about 30 years and I have never had a piece missing.

I’m constantly impressed that they just always all the pieces.

What I have found is that sometimes there is 1 piece stuck in the bag after I have dumped it out. So I keep the bags until I’m finished building the set.

I have received a set with pieces missing. I bought the set off eBay, and the seller swore it was new. I didn’t just misplace the pieces either- one was a wheel, not a tiny part

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