Sate your Cities Skylines obsession with Lego micro skyline MOCs: From Mordor to The Little Mermaid, and heaps of real-life cities too

LOTR skyline mini Lego MOC
(Image credit: benbuildslego)

If there's one thing my heart cannot handle, it's objects that are far smaller than they have any right to be. I'm not allergic to adorableness, though my throat does close up somewhat causing me to form generally indecipherable words several octaves higher than usual. I've found my kryptonite in bonsai trees, micro pigs, and now this: Micro Lego skylines.

Seriously, why did no one tell me mini Lego skylines were a thing? In fact, don't get me any of the best Lego sets for my birthday, I'm pivoting to something called MOCs. Admittedly this is an acronym I've just discovered, but it's one that's used all the time in the Lego community. MOC just stands for 'My Own Creation', and is used to refer to a fan-made design that's either made from spare bricks, or reassembled – AKA. 'rebricked' (so many new words today) – from official Lego sets.

As prolific nano-builder denjohan notes in the description of their nano version of the Venice Skyline, "The small scale makes details rather hard to achieve". Yet somehow they managed to fit a recognisable rendition of the Floating City onto a 2x12 Lego plate. That's some talent.

For a small price, and sometimes for free, you can get hold of the fan-made instructions to build these little skylines yourself. There's even a section under each design to help you source the exact selection of bricks necessary to make them, if you don't have them lying around already.

I believe you've just witnessed my rebirth into the Lego fandom, so I thank you for sitting in to welcome me. Be right back while I build a shelf to house a neverending nano Lego skyline around my entire bedroom.


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Katie Wickens
Freelance writer

Katie is a freelance writer with almost 5 years experience in covering everything from tabletop RPGs, to video games and tech. Besides earning a Game Art and Design degree up to Masters level, she is a designer of board games, board game workshop facilitator, and an avid TTRPG Games Master - not to mention a former Hardware Writer over at PC Gamer.