Gamertag: CyberKnight: Building the Covenant Scarab

Two years ago, I built the Halo Mega Bloks set Forward Unto Dawn, and I documented the building process for fun. Recently, I got my hands on the Scarab building set, and I decided to do the same thing.

The set is a record 3,340 pieces — beating the previous two sets, the Mammoth and the Forward Unto Dawn by a decent margin. It comes in a roughly 15lb box that is about as tall but not quite as wide as that of the Dawn. Inside the lid is a picture of the set in an "action shot" with some special effects (laser blasts and explosions) added. Two boxes contained the parts, and the instruction manual was underneath.

The parts came in 34 numbered bags, two larger bags that themselves contained smaller bags of parts (not numbered), one variety of plates that was completely loose, and one tiny bag that had replacement parts for the Jackals' forearms. (The simple instructions included with those indicated that I was to remove the forearms that came on the Jackals, throw them away, and replace them with these. To be honest, I couldn't tell any difference between the parts I tossed and the replacements.)

All pieces, and the one that's missing (inset, left)

The first task, as always, is to open all of the bags, sort and count all the pieces, and compare the counts with the counts in the manual. I've come up with a decent system over the years, that involves taking pictures of the piece counts in the manual and importing them into OneNote. As I open a bag, I sort and count the pieces, and then scribble over the count in my OneNote picture when the counts match (or circle them with the actual count number for later). Although there's not much of a correlation between the pieces in the bags and the order the pieces appear in the manual, it is probably the easiest way I've come up with to do it. Alas, of the 3,340 pieces required, I was short one piece of one type. Although I've collected quite a few spare parts from other sets over the years, there were none that would substitute for this one. So, I put my replacement order in on the website, and then set about the monumental task of building this thing.

The instructions are divided into sections, and the first gives me a nice, quick "win": building the Prophet of Truth's hologram. The next sections constructed the legs. The nice thing about the leg construction is that each set — the front pair and the back pair — are identical; so I just had to do each step twice. On the one hand, it's a little disappointing that there isn't a little more variety in construction; but on the other hand, it was much more satisfying to build them than to build one full set of instructions for one piece, and then build a whole new set of instructions for the other piece that was simply mirrored from the first.

The following section was for the top turret, but I decided to leaf through the pages and see if my missing piece was featured in this section. Seeing a step that required that piece, I decided to skip it and move on to building the body. As I was pretty confident that I would not be able to complete the entire build in one Saturday, I preferred this order anyway — I figured I could get most of the pieces accounted for, and when I had to clean up at the end of the day, I would have to deal with fewer loose pieces to try and keep organized.

The build was long, but mostly uneventful. My biggest difficulty was this step:

Steps like these are extremely difficult to deal with, because it requires a large collection of pieces to fit precisely over another large collection of pieces, and they are never a perfect fit. This particular step took me several attempts at getting it to fit, including some shoving and slipping and causing a corner of a block to take a chunk of skin off of my hand. The Mammoth had a similar step, but that one wasn't as difficult as this. What I found particularly annoying is, it could very easily have been rewritten to build up upon the existing base instead of building the full plate and trying to attach it all at once. I know this because, when I got it almost on but had to adjust the fit on one side, I ended up ripping it apart a bit and was able to put it on in a couple pieces.

This build loses some more points for having another similar step a little later (though a smaller area made it not as difficult as this).

One thing that surprised me was the lack of a sticker sheet. I didn't feel that there were too many details missing without them, and to be honest, I wasn't too disappointed with the omission. The stickers have a tendency to curl up around the edges and tend to be more of a pain to put on than they're worth, to be honest.

The completed build stands taller than the Dawn and much larger than the Mammoth.

Overall, I'd give the Scarab a 7/10. Most of the build isn't too difficult, it's just long. The difficult build step noted above was even more disappointing in that it makes a rather large interior section almost completely inaccessible, as you can see in the pictures below (disappointing if you want to recreate the Scarab boarding scene from Halo 2). There are other details that seem wrong, such as the exclusion of turrets on the sides (that are essential for taking one of these bad boys down in Halo 3), and the power core mounted just a little higher than it should be. The knees don't bend, either -- though, to be honest, I doubt they could have realistically built those joints and have them hold the weight of the body. They are fairly limited in their range of movement, though (again, probably to maintain some semblance of structural integrity), which makes it very difficult to find a place to display the thing. With my wife's help, I did manage to find a bookshelf on top of which it could actually fit; though in my quest to find a suitable home, I did end up bumping the legs on a wall, only to hear one of the pieces of "knee armor" rattle behind the bookshelf and out of sight. I hope to find it again someday….