UPDATE: Droid Depot at Disneyland now offers a 14 day advance reservation. Reservations available on the Disneyland website. Some same day reservations will be held back until 7am on the day of visit for those unable to book two weeks in advance.
Who hasn’t wanted to own their own droid after watching the Star Wars movies? I know as a kid I wished I had an R2D2, and as an adult, I found BB-8 adorable. So when I heard that they would have a build your own droid experience at Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, I was all in. I was able to go opening day and build my very own droid to take home. Was it worth the money? Let’s take a look.
When I told my kids I was heading to the opening of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge without them, they were not too thrilled. But I decided, like any good parent, I could bribe them to not whine about it. I promised to bring them home a custom built droid. It worked, as long as I promised to bring them home BB-8. No other droid would do.
Build Your Own Droid at the Droid Depot in Galaxy’s Edge
Building a droid at the Droid Depot is one of the few kid-friendly things to do in the land. While most activities are geared more towards teens and adults, children will easily be able to enjoy building their own droid because it is a very simple process.
The droid building cost $99 (plus tax) and there were no Annual Passholder discounts. Honestly, I had imagined the droid experience would cost much more than that, so when prices were announced, I was quite pleased. $99 was not a bad price.
While the basic experience is $99, you can also buy accessories for your droid such as personality chips, stickers, and backpacks to carry them in. I did not purchase any of these items. My droid still interacted with the land without the personality chip, so I am not sure those are worth the cost.
We went into the Droid Depot just after 8 pm, and the line was pretty short. According to the Disneyland website, only the builder and one guest would be allowed, but we had no problem getting our entire group of four to be allowed to go together to build one droid. We also specifically asked about families building a droid together, and the Cast Member indicated there would be no problem with multiple people building one droid.
Note: Disney has noted that this experience may utilize a reservation system similar to Savi’s Workshop or Oga’s Cantina depending on demand. Please check with a Cast Member to see if you need to make a reservation upon entering the land. But so far they haven’t been needed that we know of.
Choosing Your Droid Parts
When you purchase your droid you must choose which type of unit you wish to build. I knew that no matter what I wanted a B unit droid. I knew that the spherical B units would be much easier for my preschoolers to control than the R units.
The Cast Member there was able to sell personality chips if you wanted, but you could not test them out if purchased at this point. It was more of a “blind bag” situation. I decided to forgo the personality chip for that reason (and I did not want to wait in a second line to purchase accessories afterwards).
Once you pay for your droid, the Cast Member hands you a basket for the type of droid you specified. This basket lets you know what parts to grab from the conveyor belt of droid parts. Make sure you get all the parts!
This part was pretty quick since I knew exactly what I wanted, but you could spend a lot of time finding the parts to make your custom droid.
Time To Build Your Droid
Once you have all the parts, you will need to go to a droid building station. We had a short, couple minute wait before a station opened up.
A Cast Member will help you with the building process. One thing that happened while building my droid was we could not get the pieces to line up for the bottom sphere. We moved on to other tasks, and then when we went back to that and the Cast Member finally was able to make the sphere click together, I specifically asked “Will I ever have to open this up again since it was so hard to snap together?”
I was told no, but I later found out that information was not correct. You must open your droid up to turn them off, load personality chips, and pair it if for some reason the remote control is no longer paired. Thankfully, I never had an issue snapping the pieces back together after the initial build.
The actual building of the droid was super quick, taking maybe 5 minutes. I imagine it would take longer if a child was doing the building, but no more than 10 minutes.
Once your droid is built, the Cast Member will put them in a box and you can shop for accessories or head out to explore more of Galaxy’s Edge.
After The Build: Droid Tips And Reviews
After you leave the Droid Depot, don’t be surprised if your droid makes noises, vibrates, and more while in Galaxy’s Edge. In fact, it would always be about the time I forgot he was able to make those noises that it would happen again.
Be sure to shut the droid and the remote control off when not in use. It can drain batteries pretty fast.
TIP: Speaking of batteries, the droid takes 6 AA batteries and the controller takes 2 AAA batteries. If you know you will be using your droid a lot, I strongly suggest investing in rechargeable batteries, at least for the main unit.
The controller is quite large and very easy for my kids to use. Even my four-year-old twins have pretty much mastered how to control our custom built droid.
My Thoughts
The biggest question I have gotten is if Droid Depot is worth the cost. My family loves remote control vehicles. A high quality, remote control vehicle can run $75 or more, so to me, $99 for a custom built droid was a great deal. I feel like the unit is high quality, and it has held up to my crazy crew of kids playing with it nearly daily for two weeks. We all know that is the real test.
One thing about the BB units is that they do not do well on sidewalks or hard surfaces. We took ours outside one day, and while it could move just fine, when you stopped it, the unti would sway and roll around for quite some time. I definitely feel the BB units are more for indoor use on a carpet.
All said and done, the experience was enjoyable. It was fun to pick out parts, and then put them together. While it may not have the coordinated performance as Savi’s Workshop, the experience was still worth the cost and the time away from the rest of Galaxy’s Edge.
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