[OFFICIAL] 10320 Eldorado Fortress - Retiring SOON!

[AyeMatey]

Interested to see some MOC's with two sets.

[eldiano]

2 hours ago, F1stzz said:

 

Bruh, the °45 angle was a complete necessity, right, TLG?  I wanna tell you this tho: look at the design of PoTC 4194 Whitecap Bay's gates & think about the ways to brick build a tiny copy of that with some changes in order to fit this goddamn doorway. I'm not claiming it's a 100% working idea, but something about the design of those brick built gates makes me think a similarly executed structures can fix the issues with the entrances to the fortress itself (those lattices provided with the set AIN'T NO GATES, I tell ya) & the office. I'm sure there's a solution without the need to rebuild the whole doorway, just gotta dive deeper into our options.

This is why I had to build the set first I think, when you combine it and look at it in person, I saw ways to expand it. It's a technicality because they were going for the modular design, the main focus of this set is to be modular when you connect the rear wall to the top of the governors office, the canon doesn't give you that's much room for him to be there anyways, my logic is to move the cannon more to the right and expanding the balcony because there's more room and actually giving him a chair and a victorian statue or bust. What I love about that specific rear piece is that the balcony and room at the bottom can be expanded like 1 or 2 more studs. 

I'm leaning towards getting a second one soon just for add more rooms but a total surprise to me was that in the manual it tells us that the rear portion of the fort is a pier for the 21322 Barracuda bay and the front pier is for the imperial trading ship lol 

This set is meant to be displayed in its modular form, I think a second set would fix this bad boy into recreating a more accurate fort:

 

Poor governor can’t plan anything in this room

The base of that specific section can be completely saved with the amount of room still available though

Edited July 6, 2023 by eldiano

[Arjo]

Yep UK-based. Good idea to brick build doors for the main entrance. Admiral chamber has to lose the cannon and make better use of the space that can be fully enclosed. But for someone like me who has quite a few pirates but ZERO imperials, 6 won’t do so I will wait to find out whether or not more can be purchased on their own (and I don’t need the legs😆).

[Roebuck]

9 hours ago, Arjo said:

Admiral being IP locked is a bummer:( how doesone even find out about this? Are the soldiers unlikely to make it to PaB too? If that is the case then it is a double edged sword for TLG. I might reconsider getting the set altogether if I have no hope of adding to the troops at a more reasonable price point…

I do not know how, but it is from people that know a lot more about programing than me, I assume they download the data from TLG.. The soldiers is IP marked as well unfortunately, but other than that most part I have seen from the set is not e.g. printed sail, new hat/hair and new pirate torso.
However I assume this can change and if they do not show up with the other parts in 4 months time if enough people send a polite mail to CS asking for them maybe they will change their mind

[eldiano]

40 minutes ago, Arjo said:

Yep UK-based. Good idea to brick build doors for the main entrance. Admiral chamber has to lose the cannon and make better use of the space that can be fully enclosed. But for someone like me who has quite a few pirates but ZERO imperials, 6 won’t do so I will wait to find out whether or not more can be purchased on their own (and I don’t need the legs😆).

I agree, that canon has to go! One of the other roofs has a canon space that’s perfect but it’s facing the crane. This set is so modular that the manual is legit split into sections, like the first book is just the ship, the second book is the main entrance and front wall, the other book is the rear turrets, etc, like you can start off on random parts of the fort if need be!!! I stocked up on imperial soldiers any chance I got a while back, but now I need to build my other pirate sets to see how they fit with this one hehe.  

 

16 minutes ago, Roebuck said:

I do not know how, but it is from people that know a lot more about programing than me, I assume they download the data from TLG.. The soldiers is IP marked as well unfortunately, but other than that most part I have seen from the set is not e.g. printed sail, new hat/hair and new pirate torso.
However I assume this can change and if they do not show up with the other parts in 4 months time if enough people send a polite mail to CS asking for them maybe they will change their mind

The next four months are going to be brutal waiting to see if they do pop up or not!!! 

[Roebuck]

11 minutes ago, eldiano said:

The next four months are going to be brutal waiting to see if they do pop up or not!!! 

There is always something to wait for with Lego so better get used to it

[Arjo]

If it turns out to be true, what a letdown, to me worse than the set never seeing the light of day. I really hope we have a shot at a decent number of imperials at a reasonable price. No purchase until the verdict is in:(

[LegoAUT]

13 minutes ago, Arjo said:

If it turns out to be true, what a letdown, to me worse than the set never seeing the light of day. I really hope we have a shot at a decent number of imperials at a reasonable price. No purchase until the verdict is in:(

I don‘t know how this can be worse than not getting a set at all. First, you get 6 imperials, second, there will be more on Bricklink as well. So if you are army building and you don‘t aim for 100 soliders, you should be alright. 

[Arjo]

It might be time for my first foray into BL then… i have resisted the temptation to go down that rabbit hole until now as it might make my habit even worse…

[Yperio_Bricks]

2 hours ago, Arjo said:

If it turns out to be true, what a letdown, to me worse than the set never seeing the light of day. I really hope we have a shot at a decent number of imperials at a reasonable price. No purchase until the verdict is in:(

Yeah, if it is true it is a classic LEGO move. They know how to make customers happy. Not. I had planned to get some imperials from PAB online to populate mocs. We'll see. I can wait

[F1stzz]

10 hours ago, AyeMatey said:

Interested to see some MOC's with two sets.

Oh, I'm all into it as well 

8 hours ago, eldiano said:

I think a second set would fix this bad boy into recreating a more accurate fort.

Yeah, absolutely — some sections being mirrored with a second copy could expand certain areas A LOT, I believe  TY for providing the pics, m8, rly appreciated 

[dimc]

As I look around and realize I have 17 original bluecoat soldiers (out on display, others are packed away), I feel like I've done well to keep all of them. I should be all set building out scenes using just the figures included with this.

[DonQuixote]

18 hours ago, eldiano said:

 

🤣Roebuck mentioned that lego has locked the admiral torso/admiral hat and admiral flag as an IP so we won’t be able to buy them directly from PaB ever or for a long while. 

 

That's a smart move of Lego. There are allready people like me buying only Lego minifigs on PaB and Bricklink to populate buildings and ships from alternative brands. Not because they are cheaper but because they have a wide offer of western, castles and pirate sets. I like the Eldorado Fortress but I like the Imperial Fortress of Bluebrixx more. It consists of 4 modular buildings wich are sold seperately. If you combine them you have a really impressive beautiful Imperial Fortress with a real governors office. I really want a youtuber compare both fortresses. Lego knows this and they try to stop that by not providing those minifigs on PaB. It is really the smartest move for Lego to do. Most YouTube reviewers who compare Lego with other brands are German. Luckily I understand it mostly 

Edited July 6, 2023 by DonQuixote

[Arjo]

It might be commercially savvy but I for one am surprised as I thought only third-party IP was subject to such restrictions. Not sure why imperials would be excluded when lion knights were not for example. In fact, in the case of 10305 the queen torso (de facto the most exclusive in the set) even ended up in build a minifig stations… TLG work in mysterious ways…

[LegoAUT]

25 minutes ago, Arjo said:

It might be commercially savvy but I for one am surprised as I thought only third-party IP was subject to such restrictions. Not sure why imperials would be excluded when lion knights were not for example. In fact, in the case of 10305 the queen torso (de facto the most exclusive in the set) even ended up in build a minifig stations… TLG work in mysterious ways…

It is not clear yet whether the figs will in fact not appear on PaB. I am almost certain that the torsos will appear on there, maybe not the admiral hat. 

[jodawill]

8 hours ago, Roebuck said:

I do not know how, but it is from people that know a lot more about programing than me, I assume they download the data from TLG.. The soldiers is IP marked as well unfortunately, but other than that most part I have seen from the set is not e.g. printed sail, new hat/hair and new pirate torso.
However I assume this can change and if they do not show up with the other parts in 4 months time if enough people send a polite mail to CS asking for them maybe they will change their mind

If you go to the Missing Pieces page on their website, you can use the network inspector tool in your browser to get the curl command for the request that populates the element list for a set. If you're using MacOS or Linux, you can paste this into your terminal to download the data for a set.

SET_NO=10320
curl "https://bricksandpieces.cs.services.lego.com/api/v1/bricks/product/${SET_NO}?country=US&orderType=broken" --compressed -H 'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/114.0' -H 'Accept: application/json, text/plain, */*' -H 'Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5' -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br' -H 'x-api-key: saVSCq0hpuxYV48mrXMGfdKnMY1oUs3s' -H 'Origin: https://www.lego.com' -H 'DNT: 1' -H 'Connection: keep-alive' -H 'Referer: https://www.lego.com/' -H 'Sec-Fetch-Dest: empty' -H 'Sec-Fetch-Mode: cors' -H 'Sec-Fetch-Site: same-site' -H 'Sec-GPC: 1' -H 'Pragma: no-cache' -H 'Cache-Control: no-cache' -H 'TE: trailers' > "${SET_NO}.json"

 

And if you have jq installed, you can also format it to make it more legible:

SET_NO=10320
curl "https://bricksandpieces.cs.services.lego.com/api/v1/bricks/product/${SET_NO}?country=US&orderType=broken" --compressed -H 'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/114.0' -H 'Accept: application/json, text/plain, */*' -H 'Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5' -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br' -H 'x-api-key: saVSCq0hpuxYV48mrXMGfdKnMY1oUs3s' -H 'Origin: https://www.lego.com' -H 'DNT: 1' -H 'Connection: keep-alive' -H 'Referer: https://www.lego.com/' -H 'Sec-Fetch-Dest: empty' -H 'Sec-Fetch-Mode: cors' -H 'Sec-Fetch-Site: same-site' -H 'Sec-GPC: 1' -H 'Pragma: no-cache' -H 'Cache-Control: no-cache' -H 'TE: trailers' | jq . > "${SET_NO}.json"

 

You can also filter only the ones that are designated as IP elements:

$ jq '.bricks[] | select(.isIPElement)' 10320.json
{
  "color": "Blue",
  "colorFamily": "Br.Blue",
  "description": "MINI UPPER PART, NO. 6629",
  "designId": 76382,
  "isIPElement": true,
  "imageUrl": "https://www.lego.com/cdn/product-assets/element.img.lod5photo.192x192/6444301.jpg",
  "itemNumber": 6444301,
  "itemQuantity": 1,
  "price": {
    "amount": 0,
    "currency": ""
  },
  "maxAmount": 1,
  "isAvailable": true,
  "unavailableReason": null,
  "isSoldOut": true,
  "category": "Figure Parts",
  "materialType": "ELEMENT"
}
{
  "color": "Blue",
  "colorFamily": "Br.Blue",
  "description": "MINI UPPER PART, NO. 6631",
  "designId": 76382,
  "isIPElement": true,
  "imageUrl": "https://www.lego.com/cdn/product-assets/element.img.lod5photo.192x192/6444336.jpg",
  "itemNumber": 6444336,
  "itemQuantity": 5,
  "price": {
    "amount": 0,
    "currency": ""
  },
  "maxAmount": 5,
  "isAvailable": true,
  "unavailableReason": null,
  "isSoldOut": true,
  "category": "Figure Parts",
  "materialType": "ELEMENT"
}
{
  "color": "White",
  "colorFamily": "White",
  "description": "ADMIRALS HAT, NO. 12",
  "designId": 103623,
  "isIPElement": true,
  "imageUrl": "https://www.lego.com/cdn/product-assets/element.img.lod5photo.192x192/6436389.jpg",
  "itemNumber": 6436389,
  "itemQuantity": 1,
  "price": {
    "amount": 0,
    "currency": ""
  },
  "maxAmount": 1,
  "isAvailable": true,
  "unavailableReason": null,
  "isSoldOut": true,
  "category": "Figure, Head Clothing",
  "materialType": "ELEMENT"
}
{
  "color": "White",
  "colorFamily": "White",
  "description": "FLAG 6X4, W/ 2 HOLDERS, NO. 4",
  "designId": 103621,
  "isIPElement": true,
  "imageUrl": "https://www.lego.com/cdn/product-assets/element.img.lod5photo.192x192/6436387.jpg",
  "itemNumber": 6436387,
  "itemQuantity": 1,
  "price": {
    "amount": 0,
    "currency": ""
  },
  "maxAmount": 1,
  "isAvailable": true,
  "unavailableReason": null,
  "isSoldOut": true,
  "category": "Signs, Flags And Poles",
  "materialType": "ELEMENT"
}

 

 

Edited July 6, 2023 by jodawill
Fixed whitespace

[zinnn]

Can someone who owns this set set it up next to the PoBB (the island version) to show how those two look next to each other?

[Arjo]

Impressive forensic IT skills. Going to keep the faith it might only be a temporary flag/limitation. Because it does involve third-party IP maybe we’ll be fortunate enough that TLG will lift the restriction at some point).

i was eyeing the admiral hat and torso for napoleonic era cavalry but if we only have the soldier torso (and shako), I’ll be pretty happy already.

[F1stzz]

1 hour ago, zinnn said:

Can someone who owns this set set it up next to the PoBB (the island version) to show how those two look next to each other?

@CapnRex101 has the picture you're asking for in his review posted on Brickset 

Another photo found on Insta, courtesy of steinaufstein_official 👌

Edited July 6, 2023 by F1stzz

[iragm]

4 hours ago, DonQuixote said:

I like the Eldorado Fortress but I like the Imperial Fortress of Bluebrixx more

That fortress is underwhelming to me --  I looked at the instructions and the only interesting part of the build was the wine rack in the cellar.  The rest of it looks like someone's MOC from the early 2000s--all very basic techniques and pieces.  To say that it's better than Eldorado doesn't give credit to the Eldorado build techniques and overall look and feel, which are unquestionably above average.  Is there better stuff than Eldorado on rebrickable?  You bet.  Is there better stuff from Bluebrixx?  No.

 

@jodawill great detective work, however, that API is not the PAB API and none of the parts are on the PAB API yet.  It makes sense (financial sense for TLG) that these soldiers will be on PAB just as the Lion Knights are.  I'd bet quite a lot on it.  Give it about 4 or 5 months.

[LegoAUT]

8 hours ago, iragm said:

That fortress is underwhelming to me --  I looked at the instructions and the only interesting part of the build was the wine rack in the cellar.  The rest of it looks like someone's MOC from the early 2000s--all very basic techniques and pieces.  To say that it's better than Eldorado doesn't give credit to the Eldorado build techniques and overall look and feel, which are unquestionably above average.  Is there better stuff than Eldorado on rebrickable?  You bet.  Is there better stuff from Bluebrixx?  No.

I agree with the general sentiment of your comment, I also think the BB fort is lacking.. something (cannot really say what). However I don‘t see how the building techniques of Eldorado are more advanced, really. Both of them are mainly traditional brick on brick builds or what are the above average, more advanced techniques in Eldorado in your opinion? 
 

A fact is that BB offers much more furniture and accessories in their sets, an abundance of crates, bottles, barrels, weapons etc. but like I said, something is missing with regard to that fort. But then again, it‘s made mainly for kids, nor for AFOLs.

[iragm]

5 hours ago, LegoAUT said:

Both of them are mainly traditional brick on brick builds or what are the above average, more advanced techniques in Eldorado in your opinion? 

There's plenty of SNOT techniques in Eldorado.  Take a look at the instructions: the entire 6277 ship is excellent, non-traditional, design.  In the main structure, look at the crane, the ramp (and how it's locked in place), the ingot windows and the round front area under the cannon.  Please note that I like Eldorado a lot more than most folks in this thread seem to, but I readily admit that it's a far cry from Barracuda Bay or the Lion Knight's Castle.

5 hours ago, LegoAUT said:

[accessories] missing with regard to that fort.

Yes, it would feel much more alive with accessories.  And it could use more interesting angles like the Lion Knight's Castle.  It's not perfect. But it's much better than the BB set, which is literally just a rectangular building and a brick-built base.

 

5 hours ago, LegoAUT said:

But then again, it‘s made mainly for kids, nor for AFOLs.

Both sets are made for adults, aren't they?

[Khargeust]

I'm not a fan of white ingots for wall finishes, a smooth piece like in the 10305 castle or even exposed studs like in the original would have been preferable. 

What do you think of the pieces in dark red to represent the exposed bricks? Better than masonry pieces ? I think there is too much of it... I also miss a lot the original printed walls. They have a singular charm that can't be beaten.

Edited July 7, 2023 by Khargeust

[F1stzz]

11 minutes ago, Khargeust said:

What do you think of the pieces in dark red to represent the exposed bricks? Better than masonry pieces ? I think there is too much of it...

We've had a little convo about it earlier in this thread and I'd say it's a matter of preference rly. I do think that masonry bricks would've done the job better in this case while saving a considerable number of pieces. I suppose my problem with the use of multibrick combos in dark red here is:

1) This is a playset, which has a strict piece count & dimensions — not a specifically designed MOC, which is generally not meant for sale and where the amount of parts can potentially grow limitlessly (even tho 10320 is desperately trying to make an impression of such a build);

2) The use of the aforementioned combos is a bit too chaotic. It would've been enough to simply imitate the printed walls by copying the pattern of those with bricks & additionally placing some of these copied patterns in fitting areas (such as the prison walls) — and it would've looked nicer. Unfortunately, as I've said previously, 10320 tries too hard to mimic some MOC builds for its own good, that's why the use of multibrick combos in here feels kinda inconsistent (if not completely random) to me.

[LegoAUT]

2 hours ago, iragm said:

Both sets are made for adults, aren't they?

No the BB set is not made for adults compared to their medieval (BB special) buildings like castle Blaustein, it‘s very obvious when you look at the grade of detail and piece count. 

1 hour ago, Khargeust said:

I'm not a fan of white ingots for wall finishes, a smooth piece like in the 10305 castle or even exposed studs like in the original would have been preferable. 

What do you think of the pieces in dark red to represent the exposed bricks? Better than masonry pieces ? I think there is too much of it... I also miss a lot the original printed walls. They have a singular charm that can't be beaten.

I personally prefer all those things you don‘t like and do not like the things you would prefer like printed wall panels haha. Guess it‘s impossible to please everyone. I believe the majority prefers newer building techniques over pure nostalgia though.

Edited July 7, 2023 by LegoAUT