Lego Hyrule: Northeast
Death Mountain, Akkala, and Lanayru
Lanayru Great Spring (the area around Zora's Domain) was the hardest part of the entire project. In-game, it's a breathtakingly beautiful zone. It's a sort of "box" of mountains containing an absurd number of waterfalls, all pointed inward. Everything is made out of blue stone and crystalline blue glass, which changes color depending on how the light hits it, there are sheer drops and dizzying vistas and weird coral-like outcroppings and plants in unearthly colors and light sparkling off a thousand surfaces. I love it.
In lego, though? it sucked.
A huge amount of detail crammed into a tiny area? That's hard. Everything is at a funky angle to the rest of the map? That's even harder. And everything's blue, but the stone and glass need to be distinguishable from the blue water? Ugh.
There are two new-ish lego colors "dark blue" and "sand blue", but I didn't own any of either of them. So almost every piece in Lanayru Great Spring is a custom order from bricklink.com
I went through so much trial and error, building and breaking and rebuilding the "box" of Lanayru Great Spring, attaching it to the baseplate and breaking it off and attaching it again at different angles, and then trying to make the land around it connect... Legos really do not make it easy to build diagonally, but I discovered a lot of tricks to do it anyway.
It's probably the part of the map that I've put the most work into and am still the least happy with.
The fish piece is a stone dolphin made to decorate the corner of the rooftop of an old Lego ninja castle set. I got lucky in that it's the same pose as the giant fish statue that marks Zora's Domain. (It should be blue, not grey, but I can't have everything).
I guess this is a good place to talk about the Divine Beasts. Vah Medoh was easy since I already had a tiny bird in my lego collection. Vah Rudania here was the result of searching bricklink.com for "lizards", and finding a tiny pet gecko from one of the Friends sets.
Vah Ruta was the hardest of the four. Not only is it an elephant, it also has to fit into one of the most cramped regions of the map. The is no "tiny elephant" individual lego piece. The smallest ones I could find were still way too big.
So finally... you know how the first time you spot Vah Ruta in the game, it's submerged, and all you can see is its trunk sticking out of the lake, spraying water into the air?
Yeah. That's my Vah Ruta. Just the trunk there. Kind of a cop-out, I know.
Above: View from the north side
Akkala, seen from the ocean, looking west.
Above: close-up of Skull Lake in north Akkala. It looks like a skull, but only when seen from directly above. In-game, I went right past it without realizing it was the skull-shaped lake I was looking for.
It's way out of scale. It's about six times bigger on the lego map than it should be; that was the smallest I could make a recognizable skull shape out of legos. If it was to scale with the game it would only be about one lego bump across.
