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Comment by mongol | Hacker News Reader

What I remember from childhood was that you were often looking for a particular piece you knew you had, but could not find it. This app could be useful for that.

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Having recently done some moderately frustrating builds for the first time since my age was in single digits, I discovered that a small amount of pre-sorting radically improved this situation. And it doesn't seem to matter what parameter you index on: colour, size, type - anything to reduce the search space seems to work. Nor does the sort need to be complete. Just reducing the size of the unsorted pile also helps.

Oh man, nowadays, presorting is one of my main ways of Lego play. I never knew I had such ocd tendencies. But if I can change maximal entropy into neat stacks of color and shape, I feel like god.

When my son was still interested and I was building with him, I did not have the patience to pre-sort, but I used to casually sort while searching for a piece, and so the search time for subsequent pieces would gradually drop.

Then kids play once and wreck your presort.

Teach them how!

It's gotten worse, too. There used to be a limited amount of colors. My daughter now has a lot of of the Lego Friends series. It's very difficult, because there's pink, light pink, purple, light purple, and some sort of lilac. So if you want to perfectly build a piece, it takes a whole lot of searching. But then again, it's kinda fun too because you're forced to substitute.

If you keep your LEGO sorted then many builders suggest sorting by part rather than by colour - its a lot easier to identify a pink vs. hot pink 1x4 brick, rather than to find the 1x4 brick in your hot pink box.

However, sorting by part can be frustrating. Imagine only 1x1 tiles/plates (i.e. the pieces which are 1/3 the height of a regular brick), to my knowledge there are:

* 1x1 square plates (i.e. with a stud on top), * 1x1 circular plates, * 1x1 circular plates, with a hole running through, * 1x1 square tiles (i.e. with a flat top), * 1x1 circular tiles, * 1x1 arch-shaped tiles, * 1x1 quarter-circle tiles, * 1x1 circular tiles with a nubbin on top

Yeah, sorting by color is a lot quicker than by part, though once you have things sorted by part (even roughly) it's easier to find placeholders that might not be the perfect color but still perform the same function.

All those 1x1s could go in the same place and it would still help a lot with locating them, just knowing there's a place that only has 1x1s.

If you're sorting to make it easier to build from instructions, sort by color. Otherwise sort by shape/size.

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