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LEGO made a Lars homestead, so we had to burn it down

Recently LEGO revealed its promotional items for Star Wars Day with the big ticket item being set 40531: Lars Family Homestead Kitchen. If you know anything about the fate of the Lars homestead you likely know where this is going.

After seeing the set I knew I had to make a version after the Imperials had a little visit with Luke’s aunt and uncle.

Before we start burning things down let’s look at how the set is supposed to look. Below is the only promotional image released by LEGO right now.

As you can see it shows off a relatively happy scene with Aunt Beru in the kitchen surrounded by cabinets, some greenery and even a scale model of Luke’s Landspeeder.

This is a nod to the fact that LEGO also announced the release of a huge Landspeeder set to coincide with May the Fourth 2022.

Instead of simply making something that would ape this set in a burnt out fashion, I wanted to start with an accurate base and go from there.

This means first recreating the set, a prospect that is rather challenging as it has not been released yet. On top of that, at the time of writing, the parts list and instructions haven’t been made available either.

LEGO will usually make the parts list and instructions available digitally for free so anyone with an interest in a set can see how it’s made.

With these not out yet I did my best to reverse engineer the set to start with a pristine version to destroy. Some early reviews of the set are out on YouTube which helped with this too.

I took some shortcuts to make this build work and it’s not 100 percent accurate to the original set, but it’s good enough considering what happens next.

Since I didn’t have the actual LEGO on hand to make this for real, I leaned on Stud.io which is basically a LEGO CAD programme. It’s completely free to download and use, offered by the LEGO marketplace Bricklink.

As LEGO bought Bricklink a few years ago, Stud.io is as close as we’re going to get to an official piece of software of this kind. The company did offer a more official product in the form of LEGO Digital Designer, but this has since become abandonware and hasn’t been updated in ages.

Stud.io is really simple to use and anyone can get going in it with little experience in any CAD software. It provides a tutorial to teach you the basics, an option to render your creations (the images on this page are renders in the software) and even the ability to create instructions for custom models.

With the original set now recreated I set about destroying it with fire by removing several pieces and replacing the clean white elements with black and a few shades of grey.

The small embers of fire were represented with simple fire pieces and the illusion of smoke was made by layering 2X2 round tiles. Another smoke technique is made by piling LEGO ice cream elements on top of each other. Both of these are tricks that have been used in the fandom for decades.

You can see the ice cream technique used next to the body of Aunt Beru and arguably the most grim part of the whole build with a black LEGO skeleton used in her place.

For those wanting to make the burnt version in real life it is possible as I mostly used pieces that are really available in the colours here. I did, again, take some shortcuts to make this work but they were more due to time constraints and not piece availability.

Lastly I rendered the build with a transparent background and used some black LEGO greebles to mimic the official image of the set above.

The images without the black greeble background in the gallery below have these transparent backgrounds for all your meme needs.



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