This is the first of a series of 3 tips regarding LEGO Digital Designer (LDD) and how to expand your knowledge and ability with this program. For those who remember, the early versions of LDD had a very limited part selection. The latest version, v4.3.9, has many new parts in the LDD Extended theme. But there are some who prefer to use the standard LDD theme to build, and are stuck with a small parts selection. This is for you.

Introduction

Let’s use the minifigure torso parts as examples. If you have your LDD open, you can see that despite the vast number of torso pieces produced in LEGO sets, there are very few torso varieties in comparison. We’re going to fix that.

Editing

Go ahead and close your LDD program if you have it open.

(1) Find your LDD program files. On a Windows system, this should be:

C:\Program Files (x86)\LEGO Company\LEGO Digital Designer

On older systems it will be in the Program Files folder instead of Program Files (x86). Regardless, in the folder indicated above you’ll find various files. (2) The file called ‘Preferences’ is the one we want. The file type is ‘.ini.’, but don’t let that frighten you. (3) Go ahead open this file in NotePad. You’ll find the line ‘language=en’ in there; (4) right below that, enter the following line:

Themeaccess=LEGOUniverse

(5) Save and close the file.

Application

What this does is it adds a lot of parts that have been produced over the last several years, that were not included in LDD when it was first released. Open up LDD, and it should automatically download bricks to add to your database. Check out the minifigure torso parts category, for example. There should be a lot more options now! If you’re an LDD Extended user, there may be more parts in that theme as well; especially if you do not have the latest version of LDD. You can download the latest version here.

Building Technique by Brickster_Tim