With 12 years of experience under its belt, LEGO Minecraft has a lot for Star Wars and other licensed themes to learn from moving forward.
What started with a single LEGO CUUSOO set has become one of the longest-running licensed themes, building up a dedicated fanbase and expanding its offerings block by block. LEGO Minecraft has cemented itself in history as one of the LEGO Group's most impressive feats, highlighting what can be done with licences when handled with trust from both parties, a dash of artistic liberty and a pinch of understanding your audience.
While Minecraft is unlikely to ever be quite as popular as Star Wars, Marvel and DC, the theme wouldn’t have lasted this long if it hadn’t gathered a few lessons to teach these themes. Even old dogs can learn new tricks in the LEGO portfolio and the January 2025 wave is a perfect example of this, as we've learned from spending some hands-on time with these and many other Minecraft models.
Money, money, money
One of the most notable features of licensed themes, for better or worse, is the price of sets relative to their contents compared to non-licensed themes. By contrast, LEGO Minecraft is on par with non-licensed themes despite being based on one of the biggest and best-selling video games of all time.
Star Wars’
For a direct comparison, LEGO Minecraft’s new 21270 The Mooshroom House has 500 pieces, one minifigure and five creature figures for £44.99 / $49.99 / €49.99. This is on par with NINJAGO's
And even while price-per-piece is no longer the be-all and end-all it once was, the contents of 21270 The Mooshroom House don't feel limited either thanks to a plethora of larger elements, making up a sizeable cow-shaped abode on a duo of islands. The boat comes across as a bonus build.
Printed to perfection
Assigning prices to sets obviously isn’t quite as simple as allotting £0.10 to every element, but this lesson goes one layer deeper thanks to the ratio of stickers and prints in LEGO Minecraft against that of other licensed themes.
Partially thanks to the fact that LEGO Minecraft doesn’t demand as many unique designs as other intellectual properties, the fewer decorated elements that are included in sets are almost always printed. Whether it’s paintings, mob heads or tool blocks, there are only two LEGO Minecraft sets in the theme’s 12-year run to include stickers – 21144 The Farm Cottage and 21265 The Crafting Table.
In those cases, the stickers only allowed fans to customise an element to their liking for nametags and signage, which other licensed themes have also done. The fact that LEGO Minecraft has managed to maintain a near-complete lack of stickers for over a decade is incredibly impressive despite the fewer decorated elements required overall, and few other licensed themes new or old can say the same.
The same cannot be said for LEGO Marvel, Star Wars and DC, even when you consider the number of sets under those themes compared to Minecraft.
Looking at the LEGO Minecraft January 2025 sets specifically, the printed tiles for the painting and banner in 21268 The Baby Pig House and 21267 The Illager Desert Patrol respectively would almost certainly have been stickers in any other licensed theme. It’s admirable to see such efforts being put into LEGO Minecraft year after year and this even demonstrates a level of understanding between the design team and the fans' desires not always achieved in other lines.
Stay on trend
Whether you’re looking at the 2025 range specifically or the previous decade of the block-based range, LEGO Minecraft’s designers know what the fans want and how to reward them year after year. That's not limited to prints over stickers but extends to the addition of the latest Minecraft content, too.
Just as updates with fresh mobs (Minecraft creatures) and blocks release, they appear in sets months later – that’s a quick turnaround for a licensed theme and allows fans to experience the newest content in LEGO form quicker.
Comparatively, while LEGO Marvel is usually quick to the punch with initial models based on brief concept art from films we had to wait nearly two full years for an accurate Spider-Man: No Way Home set following the film.
This issue tends to affect other licensed themes too, often due to the LEGO Group not always having access to enough material to accurately portray the content it's based on – hence why later models tend to be much more accurate and desirable. Thankfully, this doesn't appear to be as much of an issue for Minecraft.
Considering that each LEGO set can take up to a few years to make,
On the one hand, the contents of a Minecraft update and a full Spider-Man movie are very different beasts – though Beq is somewhat more comparable. On the other, this still demonstrates that Mojang Studios has trust in the LEGO Minecraft team, much to the theme's benefit. By allowing the designers more access to what's to come, they can prepare the theme accordingly in advance, always staying relatively up to date. Beyond the addition of new content, Mojang Studios' trust in the designers benefits another important aspect of the theme too.
More to the minifigures
LEGO Minecraft doesn’t tend to repeat minifigures aside from making sure that Steve and Alex are always available. When they do reappear – such as in the January 2025 sets – they take on a different form with changes to their expressions and even their accuracy. Admittedly, repeated minifigures used to be a bigger problem in LEGO Minecraft, but this was before the team were allowed to get creative with character designs.
While original content is generally sporadic across other themes – such as LEGO Star Wars' The Freemaker Adventures and Rebuild the Galaxy – LEGO Minecraft more consistently tries out original ideas independently of its source material, albeit in much smaller doses. Of the five minifigures in the January 2025 LEGO Minecraft sets, three are original designs of custom player skins. Original content is present across the vast swathe of licensed themes but it's Minecraft's regular consistency with it in minifigures that makes it stand out.
The block-based nature of Minecraft lends itself well to these original designs, and they're likely easier to create than a standard minifigure. Mojang Studios would still have to approve these on a case-by-case basis to ensure that the Minecraft brand is being represented correctly though, which would be no small effort.
Looking at 2024, 16 of 26 minifigures were also original. This is something that LEGO Minecraft has embraced in recent years, mixing up the minifigures to be much more than Steve, Alex and even the other newer default skins. This also goes to show how much trust Mojang Studios has in the LEGO Minecraft team to let them continue to create new official designs with this level of consistency each year. It fits perfectly with the creative themes of both Minecraft and LEGO too.
Battle stations
Coming back to Star Wars, the January 2025 wave of LEGO Minecraft does one important type of set better than the spacefaring theme has in recent years – battle packs.
While not named as such, there’s little doubt that 21267 The Illager Desert Patrol is a battle pack for Illagers. The faction is one of the biggest additions to the game and its lore but has so far featured in only a handful of LEGO models. As such, you would only be able to build a small group of these characters unless you purchase multiples of some expensive sets, at least before 2025.
Thankfully, 21267 The Illager Desert Patrol is here with four minifigures and 105 pieces for £12.99 / $14.99 / €14.99, greatly expanding the Illagers found in the likes of 21160 The Illager Raid. The additional Cactus Knight minifigure isn't a bad character to amass too given its exclusivity and generic design.
Combined with the lack of stickers, 21267 The Illager Desert Patrol offers excellent value compared to 75373 Ambush on Mandalore Battle Pack and
Overall, it’s clear that after a decade of sets, LEGO Minecraft has earned its spot in the portfolio and should be here to stay as an example for other licensed themes to follow. Even ignoring the inevitably higher licensing costs for the likes of Star Wars and Marvel, LEGO Minecraft still offers far fewer stickers, more varied minifigures and is quicker to new content than most other themes based on intellectual property.
These have helped it grow block by block in the last 12 years and have built up a dedicated fanbase in turn – something that every theme from newcomers like Fortnite to veterans like Star Wars should hope to achieve. While LEGO Minecraft is understandably not to everyone's taste, everyone can at least appreciate the lessons it has to offer.
The January 2025 LEGO Minecraft sets are out now and those wanting to get started with the theme would be well-served by
The LEGO Minecraft sets featured in this story were provided for review by the LEGO Group.
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