Back in 1958 Lego bricks were patented, meaning only the one company could do anything with them. Patents last for twenty years, though, so it’s been a good long time since anyone has been able to make a brick-building system based on interlocking studs, which is why everything from Mega Blocks to Cobi can use the system to create any set they’d like. Lego will go hard after anyone who flies a bit too close to the sun in terms of copying its systems, but a little differentiation is all it takes to make a legally-distinct product with no worries about surprise litigation. Plastic studded brick construction is open to anyone who’d like to design their own systems and components, but no matter how you get your brick-building action the construction is usually done by hand.
Some Assembly Required
The machines of Block Factory are here to do all that fiddly manual labor for you, mining not-Legos from a selection of infinite supply-points and stacking or gluing them into shape. Each level holds a diorama in the center of the level that’s missing a number of figurines to bring it properly to life, such as a crow for the farm or seaweed for the ocean bed, and a display in the upper-left tells you what to build. The figures need to be assembled from specific individual bricks, and clicking on the display shows how many of each are needed and breaks down where they go with a slider bar that separates each layer. Granted, for the first couple that’s not really necessary, but by the time the crow comes along a little double-checking can’t hurt.
Building Voxel Structures To Order with Modulus Demo Release
Modulus combines the creativity of a voxel editor with the satisfaction of dozens of automated processes working in sync.
The first step of the process is to put down miners on the brick patches found throughout each map. The map is a big square with a grid overlay, viewed from a top-down perspective, and fans of Shapez 2 will feel right at home with the mechanics. Miners pull up bricks, with the number per second dependent on how many squares the three by three machine covers. All nine square filled in gets sixty blocks per minute, and it drops if fewer are covered. If the map had exactly the shapes you needed then assembly would be simple, but it’s never quite that easy.
Stackers put the bricks together in the traditional way, one atop the other, while gluers kragle the bricks side-by-side. Slicers trim larger blocks down to a needed size, while slopers add an angled edge to what had been more rectangular. Painters can use either paint deposits or work in conjunction with crushers, which smash pieces into blobs of color when there’s no other way to get the shade you need. Most machines work at thirty units per minute, although a couple are faster, and there’s no charge to drop down as many as you’d like. Once a figure is complete there’s a star ranking for how many units are delivered per minute, so it’s never a bad idea to use the handy copy/paste features to drop down a mega-factory that processes at the maximum belt speed of 240 items per minute.
The Block Factory demo has been kicking around for a bit, featuring the first two levels right up to the point the requested figures start needing the larger machines to process their increased size. The full game is coming out July 11, complete with release date trailer to show off new toys like three-input assemblers and other goodies. Putting together brick toys by hand seems like a lot of work, so maybe taking a couple of hours to build the perfect high-throughput assembly line can take the stress out of the process.
