I Simulated a LEGO ECOSYSTEM...

This is an empty LEGO wasteland, and today I'm challenging myself by transforming it into a thriving ecosystem filled with LEGO plants, animals, and mushrooms. Lots of mushrooms. All right, to start, the only plants that are able to survive in this barren landscape are cacti, which I built up using a bunch of green arched pieces. These stubby ones are made with random minifigure heads, and I also got this super cool tiny plant set to yoink these cacti with actual spikes. I'm so excited how completely different this ecosystem will look by the end of the video, but does anyone else see what I'm seeing? That one cactus is moving. Hello? Oh, it's a minifigure in disguise. This is Michelle, the first of 12 figures from the new CMF line, series 25. She's traveled all by herself to this desolate wasteland to find and protect an ancient secret, founding a LEGO city called 25ville in the process. But before anyone else can move in with their own unique houses, we gotta do something about all this sand. Michelle dug and dug and dug until she hit water deep underground. It bubbled up to the surface, forming an oasis with different shades of blue plates in this gradient to make the middle part look deeper. I absolutely love how it looks, and it can sustain new animals and plants, including this palm tree made up of tiny little segments and this fancy palm tree made up of fancy segments. And now the first of 15 LEGO base plates has been transformed from dusty sand to lush green life. And it looks like the first mushroom spores have been spread as well, nothing to worry about there. But Michelle is going to need a base of operations for her restoration work, so I started building up the walls for a brand new mushroom house, which is just so poetic. The very first house in my very first LEGO city was also a mushroom, and we've come such a long way since then thanks to everyone who's subscribed. If you haven't subscribed, I'd really appreciate it if you considered. The original infamously didn't have mushroom inside, so I'm going to need to give this one a bigger interior by building the first floor into the stem, with a second floor inside the cap later on. Even with this neat little corner technique, it's all still very square, like this Minecraft mushroom house set, and we absolutely can't be having that. I do want to take at least some inspiration from Minecraft and build a massive birch forest with mushrooms on the sides of trees later on, but for now we can use these bricks with studs on the sides to attach rounded panels that I built up from a bunch of these things, with gaps for some windows, and the front door, locked tight for extra secrecy. Well it's definitely round now, rolling it like this is really fun, and it all looks very clean. A bit too clean, so let's try adding some leaves on the outside for extra detail. Except the palm leaves from the oasis are way too big, I think I need to build some different trees to, ahem, borrow from instead. So I set a timer to see what kinds of trees I could make in 1 second, 1 minute, 10 minutes, and 1 hour, and I'm actually pretty proud of all of these, especially the 1 second tree. These pre-molded lego trees are originally from the 80s, and I've always loved their classic look. They remind me of some old school lego video games I used to play. But with 1 minute, I was able to incorporate some slopes and arches into the trunk, and just kinda panic spam the leaves on top right at the end. It isn't perfect, but definitely an improvement. 10 minutes gave me time to really experiment with some weird pieces. I've got two of Michelle's log disguises stacked on top of each other for the trunk, and a brown tentacle, minion hair, candlestick, and a hot dog for the branches, all covered in leaves I was slightly less rushed putting on. And the end result was beautiful, look at the difference 9 minutes makes. I spent most of my 1 hour timer trying to figure out how on earth to make a rounded trunk, just using round bricks, using big round bricks, and building up this weird skeleton with studs all the way around. But I finally found a piece I could make work, with bars for these strips of the bark to clip onto. Top it all off with an upside down barrel, generously adorned with leaves, pop that bad boy in the oven on low, and you've got yourself my favorite tree I've ever made. In total that was 4,261 seconds well spent. Sadly none of these ones can talk, but we can finally take some of their leaves and add them to Michelle's house, helping it blend in better with its environment that's quickly turning more and more green. With a bit more vegetation, we can start reintroducing some animals back into the wild after the zoo they were in ceased operations. Starting with elk, I'm basing part of my simulation on the wildlife in Yellowstone National Park, and its elk population used to be an absolute menace. Since I haven't added any predators yet, there's just way too many of them, and they're eating all my beautiful beautiful plants faster than I can even build them. And with Michelle technically being part plant, she's next on the menu. I tried adding in a river in hopes that it could slow the elk down, but now they're completely eroding the riverbanks and making the water super cloudy. Could you chill for a second guys? Well I guess this is it. The city Michelle envisioned is over before it even began. Unless… Someone higher on the food chain arrives. Like this pack of lego wolves, with an alpha male, sigma male, wolf pup, and this one from Minecraft. They started hunting the elk down, and lowered their numbers to a point where plants could finally start to grow again, which caused a massive domino effect on the ecosystem, fixing all the problems they created. Rodents like mice and rabbits were once again able to hide in the tall grass from predators, like this terrifying fox from a lego creator set. It's definitely way too big for the scale of the layout, but you know what they say. With fresh food harder to find, the fox can scavenge any elk carcasses the wolves leave behind, along with eagles, coyotes, ravens, and mushrooms apparently. They help decompose dead plants and animals, spreading further and further across the table. We're gonna continue ignoring that, and do some interior decorating. I laid out a checkered floor pattern, with these matching curtains over the windows to boost morale. Then added some natural looking furniture, like an armchair, a table, and a bed Michelle can sleep in, underneath this staircase to the future second floor. No cap. There will be one soon though. This vase here would be perfect to display some flowers, and with the elk no longer mowing everything to the ground, some have actually started to bloom in this meadow. But that is not happy flower music. Because putting hundreds of tiny individual flower pieces on all these stems, in every color imaginable, hurt my poor fingers worse than that cactus did. So to take a break from them, I bought one of LEGO's many flower bouquet sets, as a nice, calm, relaxing, you gotta be kidding me. But I actually really love all the creative uses of pieces that aren't flowers here, like these pirate hats, boat oars, and even pterodactyl wings used as leaves in another set. It's inspired me to build my own flower out of LEGO brick separators. Eugh, yeah I think the elk are good to eat this one. But the rest of them are great for pollinators like bees and Michelle's pet butterflies to feed on, causing the flowers to produce fruits and seeds. I actually got this insect set for free that comes with a beautiful blue butterfly, a praying mantis, and a dung beetle who's starting its collection. We can add them in here behind the meadow, and as long as scale continues to be irrelevant, they look fantastic. Meanwhile the three bees here defy all known laws of aviation to take any nectar they find back to their hive that I built up using several different layers of that round panel technique from earlier, blending it all up into sweet, sweet honey. This of course attracts bears, no not that one, bears, who do actually eat honey in real life, as well as berries, mammals, and fish, if the river wasn't so cloudy and right now you can barely see anything in it. But they eat all that so they can store up fat to hibernate through the winter. I built up a giant mountainside cave for the bear to take a nap in, using these big ugly rock pieces to make a formation much taller and skinnier than the cliff back in my last city. This time I'm actually detailing it using a bunch of little slope pieces, which took forever by the way, and there's a reason I didn't do it last time. But it was well worth the painful grind it took, especially with all these beautiful cherry blossom trees up here, using the old pink frog technique. It's such a peaceful and relaxing safe haven for the bees to visit, and wild mountain goats. Michelle dug up this spring in the center that leads into a waterfall gushing down the cliff face in a cascade of transparent blue bricks that connects with the river down below. It's a perfect spot for cliff jumping. Well all of that was a weird side quest, literally just to get a decoration. But now with the first floor done, we can finally build the cap of the mushroom house. I started out with this tan platform, with a hole punched out for the stairs, and these tiny support beams underneath that smurf houses always have. Circular shapes are extremely hard to build with square lego bricks, but using a combination of some rounded corner pieces, and different shaped chunks connected together with clips, hinges, and these super flexible mixel joints, I started to make some progress. It was annoying progress. But I slowly figured out how to make it work. Now it just needs white spots, like the classic mario mushrooms. One of the flowers turned into a giant piranha plant, that's based on these real life carnivorous plants like the venus flytrap, pitcher plant, oh now she's in truffle. This is way worse than getting eaten by an elk. Except Michelle's brother, Elwood, got there just in time with his merry band of mushroom men to save the day. What champinions. Now we've got a fun guy, and a fun gal, a fun goal. I am so sorry for all my silly, um, puns. Anyways, let's actually use these pieces from the greatest smash fighters remains to make even more mushrooms. I chanterelle if this is too many or not. But with all these different sizes of spots, and a criminy on this mushroom, it's almost complete. I think Elwood's just gonna crash up here for now once we detail it. Except he needs some wood to fuel the fireplace I made. Luckily, with the elk numbers back to normal, the trees have started to grow back, denser and taller than ever, allowing a bunch of critters to build their homes in and around them. These ants built an anthill to terrorize any picnic goers. These creepily realistic spiders can spin their webs among the branches to catch food. And this giant tree is home to a nest that this songbird built for her babies. And these squirrels. It looks like they're getting along nicely with, or not. But the tree's roots reinforced the eroded riverbanks, clearing up the water for fish and beavers to thrive in. These are actually made with a scuba flipper piece, and they went to town chopping down a bunch of the new trees to build a dam in the river. Man, animals can build so many cool things without even using instructions. Oh, except for the bird. But with the water now blocked off, it created a pond with even more habitats for fish, frogs, otters, and a giant not-to-scale kingfisher bird, who all have their own unique connections to every other part of the ecosystem. It's incredible just how interconnected everything is in God's magnificent creation. And now my simulation of it is complete. I can finally go touch real grass after building with lego grass all week. And Michelle and Elwood can rest easy in their finalized mushroom house interior, knowing that regardless of whoever moves in next time, their ancient secret is safe. For now.