I really love Outer Wilds. I would say it's one of the greats, if not the greatest. I've definitely never played another game that created such great puzzles, stories, and exploration mechanics and moments - and then integrated all these aspects together so well. If you haven't, go play it!

I also like LEGO quite a bit, but only really a few models stick out to me. And I'm not big on collecting a bunch of them or the culture around that. Instead, I like the idea of designing custom LEGO models and creative uses of parts to get as much detail as possible. There is a community around this, and some people can make some incredibly detailed and well designed models.

I wanted to try my own hand at it, and I have attempted a couple times in the past too. I made a trireme and a model of Pont du Gard, a beautiful Roman aqueduct in France. But I never finalized these designs and built them. Here I decided to finally do it with the ship in Outer Wilds.

The designing process is actually pretty difficult. I spent many hours on the design - I would estimate at least 50. It took a couple months. I wanted to make a design that was as accurate and detailed as possible, without really caring too much about structural integrity (beyond that it does stay together without any outside forces). I think the design succeeds at that, with a couple of aspects that could be improved.

I used BrickLink Studio, which is a pretty neat software for designing LEGO. It also has the ability to design instructions, which I used to vaguely map out how I would actually build it once I had the parts. But the designing itself took forever for a few reasons. For one, finding the right pieces and general structure for any part of the design (which ended up being pretty large) is not a trivial task. It takes some trial and error, and I already didn't have the best knowledge on what pieces existed. Sometimes I had to go back and change things again because I learned about a new piece that would make a particular part easier. At the end I had to modify the design again to replace old and rare pieces to prevent building the model from becoming prohibitively expensive.

From the start I adopted a progressive method of design. Meaning, I started with one piece in particular for the cockpit window, and fit the rest of the design to this piece (which was just the right size and shape compared to minifgures). So the design grew out of the cockpit, towards the main chassis, then to the sides, back, legs, and tanks and outer details last. Then I had to do the coloring, and find out what pieces are readily available in the right colors and at decent prices. The whole process took forever, and one piece was just not available in the right color - the disk on top of the chassis. I made it gold instead, because it looks nice and matches some other colors in the ship. Too bad it doesn't exist in white.

This worked great to make the design have the correct proportions and details, but probably increased the time it took and difficulty by quite a bit. Then, after that, I had to actually procure the parts, which was a much larger pain than it should have been. I had to manually enter most of it into the LEGO part picker, which sent me a lot of extra pieces I didn't need while missing many that I did need, so I had to cover the missing parts with bricklink. I had to order some of the weirder parts from bricklink anyway - this ended up costing a good amount too. All in all, it costed around $400 to get all 2100 pieces in the build, a few weeks for it all to arrive.

I'm very proud of the result. It's incredibly delicate, but also incredibly accurate to the in game model. I also just think it looks really good. It would be a great set if they could make something similar, but much sturdier. I'll post a bunch of pictures of the building process. I have a lot of screenshots of the model throughout the design process, but it's probably not as interesting.

Final result!

Starting the build

random and unordered