ASML's Best Selling Product Isn't What You Think It Is

> The answer that came to me again and again was play. Every human society in recorded history has games. We don’t just solve problems out of necessity. We do it for fun. Even as adults. Leave a human being alone with a knotted rope and they will unravel it. Leave a human being alone with blocks and they will build something. Games are part of what makes us human. We see the world as a mystery, a puzzle, because we've always been a species of problem-solvers.

https://taloswiki.org/images/3/36/Scientist-02_ProblemSolver...

Unless you need the box, you can get the instructions online (https://rebrickable.com/mocs/MOC-215601/NightHawk11991/asml-...). Though that might be a recreation.

I've done my own small scale version of this where I made models for internal distribution of the specialty equipment my employer uses. I doubt they paid Lego anything.

There is software to design your own lego set. Bricklink Studio is what I used. It's essentially Lego CAD software with a component library of Lego pieces. You can do high quality renderings, generate instruction sheets and BOMs.

Lego has a Pick-a-brick service where you can get new parts from a very limited selection at great expense. At third party marketplaces like Bricklink you can upload BOMs and they will assemble shopping carts from different seller's inventories of used pieces. Price and selection is better than Pick-a-brick but shipping / order fees / minimum lot size drive up the cost. I've tried many times but even the smallest 200 piece build ends up needing orders from 3 sellers across the world. There's always some part that was only ever sold in one rare set from 30 years ago and is unobtanium (the CAD program makes it easy to include a piece regardless of actual availability).

There are also businesses that will give you a turn key product that looks very retail-like with parts bagged by step, printed instructions, real Legos, box art, etc.

If you're willing to go with "lego compatible" third party bricks like GoBricks there are many sites that can source your entire build at once with new non-lego pieces. Part quality ranges from "good enough" to "indistinguishable" and the price and ease of ordering is loads better. You get a box of unsorted parts and spend lots of time grouping the pieces into kits.

But really: "Why does this matter?" When looking at an article like this, I rarely read the text. This is just fluff no matter if AI-generated or hand written. The info is "there's a LEGO set of that ASML machine" and the picture of that set. That's all I want to know before clicking the back button.