>> For surface details, I don’t have a single Universal Greeble, but I do have a small suite of Go-To Greebles. I find that if I start with 1×1 round plates, 1×1 round tiles, bars 4L (lightsaber blades), lightsaber handles, 1×2 grille tiles, and 1×1 clip top tiles, I can greeble effectively for quite a while before I need to mix in other parts. Second tier favorites include ribbed hoses, taps, pneumatic tees, 1×1 plates, 1×2 jumper plates, headlight bricks, and grated cheese. After that maybe it’s time for some 2×2 round tiles, 2×2 tiles, 2×2 jumper plates, and 2×2 radar dishes.
This is interesting to me though cause of something it made me think of… at BrickFair years ago, I listened to Arthur Gugick do his talk, he’s best known for building microscale models of famous architectural landmarks. Towards that end, he was discussing how just about any part is useful as long as you have a lot of them, and he said to help himself, he took a 16×16 plate and he affixed all the most common parts to it for reference while he was planning and building. And he also told us that he was then pleasantly surprised when he subsequently learned that a lot of the Lego set designers do the same thing when they’re working.
So reading Dan’s list, I’m picturing him doing the something similar with all his space parts, although I don’t know that he actually does it. I haven’t actually tried it, although admittedly my most common method is to simply get out all the bags of parts, which creates a big mess and generates a lot of cleanup time.