Lego building instructions through time | Hacker News Reader

Lego building instructions through time

lego.com

158 pointsNaOH42 comments

Buried at the bottom of the article, my favorite thing about modern Lego kits:

> One of the most intriguing features is unlocked when you press the ‘build together’ button on select sets in the app. This allows consumers to build a LEGO set as a team by delegating each builder a building task to complete.

My partner and I enjoy assembling Lego kits together, but with paper instructions parallelizing the work is pretty tricky (usually we end up alternating one person doing the actual assembly and the other picking out the correct parts for them). But with the LEGO Builder app, it dynamically generates two parallel sets of instructions. It works great even if you're working at different paces.

This is one of those software features that delights me both as a user and as an engineer. It probably was not that complex to implement (once they had the building steps in a machine-readable format), but it's a great use of its medium, something that you genuinely couldn't do without software.

Had no idea this was a thing, sounds like it’d be fun with the kids. Who gets the next piece has been a problem as long as there’s been lego

On the contrary, this would ruin Legos for me and my girlfriend. We play it that one person is building, and the other person is taking the instructions and trying to speak them to the builder, who isn't allowed to look at the instructions. It's very fun and a great way for us to keep our communication going well in the relationship.

That sounds fun too!

James May did this with Lucy on one of his YouTube videos.

Since I was curious I searched for it, and you can find it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiOLrsl6WSQ

There’s an official Lego boardgame built on this concept.

I came to say the same thing. The "build together" mode is super fun. Everybody can go at their own speed (without me dying inside watching my 7-year-old trying to figure out things). If you are faster, you build more subassemblies, that's it. Everybody is busy.

The kids particularly enjoyed the moments where you have to exchange subassemblies: "I need this from 'popcorn'!" "I need this from 'astronaut'".

When the kids got tired, subsequent steps were assigned to me as if nothing had happened. I am guessing there's a DAG of tasks (to build subassemblies), and the tasks just get picked up by individual participants.

10/10

it's an MRP system for lego!

If you've ever made a digital model of Lego it can be quite surprising just how hard it is to make good instructions at the quality of Lego's - because you have to not only consider how the model goes together (can't place a brick after the bricks on top of it) but also how you can even SEE what the piece is and where it's going.

I learned this when trying to put together a Lego Baneblade, there was a BrickLink Studio file which contained the fully built BaneBlade, but the instructions were not put together for it. I did the automatically generated instructions for each part of the Baneblade, but they were all over the place, including instructions to place a brick after bricks on top of it. Still got it built though.

It's a skill, but it's not too hard to get decently good at it. It's mostly a matter of actually building your model in the real world and iteratively improving your digital model and instructions from there, and changing the camera angle for steps that need it.

Most of the time is spent fighting with Stud.io (the software) and dealing with its bugs (it runs OK in Bottles (i.e., managed Wine environments), but stupid rendering bugs mean you may have to do the final export step on a device with a different GPU).

When you also want to print a booklet of instructions, getting the generated steps neatly out of Stud.io's instruction maker and into a sane pipeline for making the print-ready PDFs takes some work (as well as CMYK conversions), but that is mostly a matter of setting up some scripts to wire up pdftk and ImageMagick and friends.

Indeed, it's hard to find a balance between what's too verbose and what's too hard. For relatively complex models it's also almost impossible to do "quality control" without actually building it.

However, I agree with the other poster that you can get good at it. And you really have to do it anyway, since creating instructions will find bugs in anything but the simplest models and you want to solve those before paying for the pieces.

It’s incredible some of the little details in LEGO instructions.

My son and I were assembling a set, and one of the corner pieces was strangely absent. My son asked, “why can’t we put this piece in yet?”

The answer came when we turned the page and saw the model had to be flipped. That missing corner piece was the only thing we could use to guide our placement of pieces on the underside of the model.

Similar things in more complex sets include using different, bright colours for bricks on the left/right sides of the internal parts of models. It makes it easy to keep your place as the model rotates through the steps.

The rotations and the color bricks are some of the most difficult to get right - and yet you never really notice them until someone points it out.

I would love simpler (harder) instructions! It's too easy tbh brick by brick as it is today. 1964 looks lovely. I also have a gripe with the complexity of modern bricks (besides "basic bricks" sets). It's getting harder to build something else than what the model is.

This 1980 style was also lovely. I rebuilt this model a few years ago - these instructions strike the balance just right. They make you think.

https://lego.brickinstructions.com/lego_instructions/set/886...

But maybe if you want to sell more you must have instructions that anyone can follow?

Those sets were marketed as 'Expert Builder' in the USA, so maybe the challenge was part of the point?

The 1980s is where LEGO instructions peaked. It all went downhill from there.

Oh my god, i yearned for that set so hard, but never got it. I got the tractor and the crane which I built with my daughter more than 40 years after my dad gave them to me. That was weird and comforting at the same time.

Agree one hundred percent. The build together option seems only required because ik modern instructions there are only like a few parts per step. Back in the day it was like 10-15, which meant every step took longer. It seems too automated today, too verbose. And yes cross building is difficult because of a lot of very small parts.

In the 80s you would get the harder instructions through the "alternative builds" on the back on the cardboard box. Just an image without instructions.

The problem is that modern sets are made up of much higher numbers of parts (especially small ones). Building them would take forever if you had to pause and think every other step, or had to play where's Wally with a dozen new small pieces all the time. Lego would first have to backtrack to simpler sets again before fixing their instruction manuals.

Yup, it's more or less defeating the whole purpose of Lego which is that you can build whatever your imagination comes up with. If I wanted an Airfix model I'd buy an Airfix model, not a click-together Minecraft simulation of one.

Very interesting article, but not very well written. A handful of examples from the first half:

1. Suddenly in the 7th paragraph: “We know for a fact that from 1967 and until 2003 the main supplier of drawing building steps for the LEGO Group was a company called Palle…”. That’s a super odd thing to preface with “We know for a fact” - are all other claims/items in the article actually not known if they aren't similarly prefaced?

2. They jump around a little in time, such as mentioning the 60s but then going back to the 50s in the next section.

3. Some photos don't show what year or decade the set or instructions are from.

4. They start by mentioning the 50s, but it would be helpful to also mention how long the bricks were made before then to quickly understand the length of the pre-instruction era - it appears 49, or 39 for wood versions, per some quick googling.

There's a bunch of lines before the 7th paragraph that say stuff like "suggests" and immediately before the line you quoted, "Although the material is scarce on the subject,". That's just the nature of history, sometimes you just don't have the full documentation even when you're talking about your own company.

> mention how long the bricks were made before then to quickly understand the length of the pre-instruction era

Worth mentioning that Lego lifted the idea from Kiddicraft. Hilary Page patented Self-Locking Building Bricks in 1939 but had committed suicide by the time Lego brought their product to the UK.

https://www.hilarypagetoys.com/Home/Products/39/0

True, but adding the hollow tube to the bottom side greatly improved how much the bricks stuck together, compared to Kiddicraft. It's not a small change.

Lego also tried other designs like crosses on the bottom but then kept the tube (and later the filled small tube that you can see on 1xN bricks and plates).

I liked the old LEGO up to around the 1990s or so, give or take. When I look at LEGO nowadays, of course they have some of the old spirit still in place, but in other areas they are just overpriced now and addicted to maximizing cash influx. This was a bit different in the pre-1990s era. 1990s already got more commercialized but I still would say it was somewhat ok. Then something shifted and I am not sure what. The creativity seems to have been degraded. I saw some huge LEGO sets for several hundred euros as collectors edition. And I understand that he had fun building it with his kids, but to me this was no longer LEGO. The most fun I had was assembling my own pieces back when I was young. For instance, after seeing the old movie Tron, I built a few of the objects in the "matrix", in particular those floating T-like thingies. These were quite easy to build via LEGO. I did not need instructions, I just experimented until it worked. I think this was the biggest selling point of LEGO, to be able to build things on your own. When I look at those huge expensive sets, that seems to have shifted. I get it, different portfolio and what not but this is also corporate fluff. It changed what LEGO is, and IMO it changed it to the worse.

The basic sets are still there; look up the Lego Classic line. And for creativity at a good price the Creator 3in1 sets are gold.

Don't be misled by all the franchised stuff (Star Wars, etc.). That stuff sells well and has its fanbase, but Lego is much more than that. Lego currently has good sets (including the user submitted Ideas range).

The focus of the most commercial sets changed.

They used to be toys, aimed at children's imagination, meant to be dismantled and rebuilt into other things.

Now they're display models, aimed at adults. They're sculptured art pieces that just happen to be built out of LEGO.

It's just the most commercially visible stuff though, because it's the best stuff financially speaking for the LEGO company themselves. The children's ranges are still there. You could even say that adults buying those display models are what's kept the toys alive.

Modern Lego set design is this super refined art where the final product looks amazing. It also sort of sucks, ninety percent of the pieces are 1x1 greebles with very few common structural elements, Distinctly different and I feel inferior from the peak of my young Lego architect career in the late 80's, and even then in retrospect, still way to many greebles and not enough structural elements. Sure you want a few of those infernal 1x1's but it feels like the era that best matches the Lego ethos was the 70's where most of the set was structural.

There are a few sets left like this and I bought some to get my nephews Lego bucket started. but still way too many useless small pieces.

You can still buy whole buckets of generic lego pieces if you wish.

Duplo is also mostly generic parts in sets.

My kids like doing themed Legos as they look cool, but for creative building we do Duplos - even though kids are "too old" for duplo technically. Duplo allows us to build bigger structures. Like https://imgur.com/a/niEhA8E

This reminded me of coming across LeoCAD (https://www.leocad.org/ - first release in 1997!) as a kid and playing around with it for endless nights, wondering how close it was to whatever tool Lego was using in-house.

Looking at screenshots of older versions gave a burst of nostalgia.

LeoCAD is really nice and smooth to work with, and on Linux a much better experience than Lego's own Bricklink Studio. Unfortunately, for instructions you can't really get away from Studio, and while importing the model made in LeoCAD works for 99% of the bricks, you tend to end up with one or two types of brick misaligned, flipped, rotated, or missing.

I just built one of those plant sets. I'm use to that modern instructions just place 1 or two bricks per step. But these plant sets took the cake. You had to build identical submodules. From the picture at the box you could see that it's essentially 8 times the same submodule. But the way the manual presented it was, that you build one submodule 2 times, fit it to the base, then build it 2 times again (same illustration!) and put them on the other side of the base. Then you start building the top and build the same submodule 2 times again, fit it to the top and then 2 times again and fit it to the other side of the top.

Might as well mention a couple of lego projects I've been working on, a parts browser TUI and a 3D model (eg .stl or .obj) to lego model (ldraw) converter:

https://github.com/hbmartin/pyldraw3/

https://github.com/hbmartin/legolization/

I'm actively trying to get good instructions out of the legolization project now

Both of your projects would benefit (as is so often to case) from screenshots.

Good call thanks! Added screenshots:

https://github.com/hbmartin/pyldraw3-tui

I am not a big fan of the predesignated final 'this is the only thing you can create' type of set. When I build with children or on my own, I pick a direction and end goal. Example: the goal is for us to build a "Space Shark Transporter" and set a time limit.

At the end we take photos and then animate them using AI.

There is other good stuff on that site.

Eg that tractor.

https://www.lego.com/en-us/history/articles/d-the-lego-fergu...

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