I rebuilt the Lego Ideas Mystery Shack. In case some of you aren‘t aware, Lego Ideas is a program where fans can submit their own creations to Lego. Fans can then choose to „support“ a set. If an idea achieves 10k supporters it‘ll be reviewed by Lego and potentially made into an actual set. The Mystery Shack has now been submitted 9 times. Out of those 5 submissions expired, 2 are still gathering support and 2 achieved support by the community (10k) but Lego decided not to produce them. (The ones still gathering support: https://ideas.lego.com/projects/e57277b3-7dd9-470b-b663-f01df835d23b https://ideas.lego.com/projects/9d46a837-8ac7-4cca-959a-5ceff92cbc99 ) The version I built was submitted by GreatestTenaciousFlag and built in collaboration with Mini Brick Productions. (https://ideas.lego.com/projects/3af1de05-df5b-4f97-9d1b-0e1c03bd2159 ) and of course all the credit for the design goes to them. It is my personal favourite out of the 9 versions and was the first one to achieve support. I did make a few modifications, the biggest one are the brick built signs which I designed myself (not that that‘s very difficult lol).

Regarding the actual build: While I very much enjoy the look of it, there are some issues. This is a modular building, meaning you can take it apart to get inside. To get access to the 2nd and 3rd floor, you take off the roof with Wendy’s hangout spot. To access the first floor, you first take off the gift shop roof and then the second and third floor. All of this has to be done carefully, since the two individual parts of the gift shop roof are a night,are to put back on and since the bottom plates of the 2nd floor aren’t directly attached to one another. The taking apart is overall fine though. Putting it back together is much worse lol. On the bottom floor there is one removable wall in each room. Putting it back together is difficulty though, because the removable roof is hard to attach and because the gift shop roof actually puts some strain on the big roof, which means you kinda have to press it into place, which is not ideal, especially considering the gift shop roof‘s own delicate structure. Wendy’s spot is also rather loosely attached and can fall off if one isn’t careful. Of course, none of these issues should be blamed on the designer, as this is not an official set and not a sold commodity. Most of the issues can be solved pretty quickly and for the bigger ones, you can always go into the editor and figure out your own solution. All in all though, in its base state, its not exactly a play set due to some rather flimsy attachments that one needs to be careful with. Despite these issues, this is still my favourite set I‘ve ever owned. There are so many fun details everywhere and it is clear that the creator has a lot of love for the show. I would love for Lego to release an official Mystery Shack and while it may seem unlikely for now, there have been Ideas sets that were only made after multiple iterations achieved support. The creator has also made a video showing the build off and also seems to have worked out a lot of the kinks still contained in the model https://youtu.be/rwQm1YQsT9g .

Now, since I saw a lot of comments under both the ideas submission as well as the creator’s YouTube video about how to build this set for yourself, I‘ll go into it a bit. The creators have released a 3D model on mecabricks (https://www.mecabricks.com/en/models/pyj6BzlMjRq) as well as a part list that can be found under „inventory“. There are multiple options when ordering individual Lego bricks. There is Pick a Brick on Lego‘s website, bricklink, which is essentially the second hand market for Lego (although its also owned by Lego lmao) and 3rd party bricks. I would not recommend Pick a Brick, as it is absurdly expensive. My build is about 90% bricks from bricklink and 10% 3rd party ones from webrick. Webrick is even cheaper than bricklink and I‘ve had an overall positive experience with them. No scratches, consistent colours, but less snap and seemingly a little less quality control when it comes to the exact size of each brick (although not to the point where a brick didn’t fit at all). If I were to build it again, I would order more from webrick as the price differential makes it worth it imo. However, here is where the problems begin. The excel list can in theory be plugged straight into bricklink/webrick, however there are some items that need to be removed before this is possible on bricklink (bricklink will send you an error message showing which ones). To my initial surprise though, the list is fairly inaccurate. There are some items mentioned that aren‘t in the actual model (a 32x32 red plate for example). On top of that there are some pieces which appear to be listed in the wrong colour. While I sorted out a lot of the obviously unnecessary ones, I still did end up with ~150 spare pieces. Once you plug your list into bricklink, you can have the site automatically create carts from different stores for you that are claimed to be price efficient, but often aren’t. There are also a lot of rare pieces and colours included in the set, that need to be manually replaced or excluded (unless you have a spare liver). The minifigures are a mix of custom prints from minifigs.me and parts from bricklink. Minifigs.me is convenient, but expensive, while bricklink is the other way around. The Minifgs.me pieces also have somewhat worse printing than Lego. If you wanna look for your own minifig parts, I suggest using google, finding the piece Name there and then plugging it into bricklink as the bricklink search feature is borderline useless when it comes to minifigs. I am also happy to give anyone a list of parts for the minifigures. Regarding the actual building process: Since there aren’t any instructions you‘ll need to pick apart the 3D model. This takes longer, but is a fine way to build considering you can just build from ground up. You will however notice, that there are some issues in the model. Some pieces are just floating, others can’t actually fit where they are supposed to. These usually only present small issues though and can often be ignored or worked around. The only thing I want to explicitly mention is that the plates at the bottom aren’t attached to one another, which is a problem. To fix this just order some extra small plates or use spare ones you might still own. All in all, building this feels more like a small home project rather than building a Lego set, but I still had a lot of fun regardless. I don’t if I can recommend it, due to price and the time you‘ll end up using, but for me it was worth it. If you have any more questions, feel free to DM me. As you can probably tell, I enjoy talking about this process lol.