Vee

I am right now testing this application, Brickficiency. It is good, can be useful, but it is taking a lot of time to find a 4-vendor solution. It's past one hour and it hasn't even got to 50% of completion. My testing brick list is kind of heavy, around 1.3k pieces. It did find 2 3-vendor solutions before but both were using a store that has unrealistic prices, so I had to blacklist it. Once blacklisted, then it could not find a 3-vendor solution anymore and is taking a looooooong time searching for a 4-vendor. I believe it will be in vain, it will not find. I think it can be helpful if we manually first buy the rarest and most expensive pieces (and whatever we think it is efficient to add to them) to lower the number of pieces and because expensive parts is better to be decided manually, prices vary too much. So a combination of manual buying with further automated-assisted buying should be nice. I am leaving the computer on for the night so that tomorrow I will see if it found a 4-vendor solution.

Based on some beautiful, eye-catching MOC's that I can't stop finding and seeing in the internet, I was thinking. These people have so much creativity that buying an official set would make no sense. Many of the MOC's I see are more beautiful than most of the official sets that I know. Of course Lego limits the size of their sets, it is rare to find sets with more than 3k pieces, and many gorgeous MOC's seem to me way beyond the 3k pieces, but there are also an infinite number of great MOC's that use much less pieces. On a side note, I was thinking, and don't get mad at me because I know that many in this board are expert builder of MOC's, but I was thinking. IF many bulders of MOC's build their models for fun, for learning, to increase knowledge and as a step for the next better model, and it is usual to take tons of pics to show (off) their models so other can appreciate and recognize them and him/her, the question that pops up in my mind is: why not take pictures of the MOC while disassembling it so we, mere mortals like me that lack creativity, can really learn and maybe even try to mimic/copy the model for ourselves? I would say that documenting (= taking pictures) of a model while developing it, while building it, is not practical because building takes time and you may change things along the way BUT disassembling a model is very straight forward, and documenting it would teach us how you made it. Why not, why keep the secret of how you did it only to yourself? I am assuming again that you (the expert builder) built it not for profit, to sell instructions or something similar, because if it is for profit, it makes perfect sense to keep secret the inner workings of your build but if it was for non-profit reasons, why not spread the word? I know there are tons of page that teach techniques and tips on how to build a MOC but there is nothing better to learn than by example. Why not?

I am very new to Lego addiction, I am not sure I got addicted already but I am worried. The last three weeks I have been spending too much time thinking and doing things related to Lego, and spending too much money. But I want to believe that all that I am doing, that I think is kind of crazy considering who and what I am, is part of a plan that I devised in the beginning of those three weeks. Once I have achieved my plan, I plan to stop acting like an addicted and go back to my normal me. Of course everything is relative and what I consider an addiction some others may consider normal. But to understand why I am afraid of being addicted, I put all our lego sets bought so far in brickset and the website says all my sets have a retail value of US$ 1912 (1st set was bought in 2004), not counting around a couple of hundreds I spent in spare parts from ebay and bricklink. That is not much under certain points of view but I have an Excel sheet where I am controlling all my new purchases, derived from that plan, and in the last three weeks alone I have spent $1.2k. So, we, as a family, spent $900 in 9 years and now, I alone, in 3 weeks, spent 1.1k. That IS worrisome. To make things worse, to finish my plan I still have to spend $540, so my total will reach US$ 1.6k+. I have been a little embarrassed in front of my family but luckily they are fine. When I explain why I am doing this, what is the plan, they kind of accept it. My biggest worry is that, after my plan is done, I can't refrain myself from buying more legos than the usual 1-3 cheap sets that we buy a year for our kids. The good thing is that in general I am very spartan in my life. I rarely spend too much money in anything, and we have no debts, on the opposite, we do have savings. My only other subject that I, every 3-4 years, spend good money, is in computer. I build our own computers every 3-4 years and usually I spend 3-4k in each build. And I never regret.

I am sorry but IMO that letter is a waste of time and silly. Lego is a privately-owned business, they do what they think it is best for their business. It is a TOY! If you want more female little lego figures in your collection, just buy 1000 of the same set that has some of them and sell the "boys" in Bricklink or ebay for a cheap value since you don't like them. Lego mimics the real world so if you want to change Lego, do something to change the real world.

I am new to MOC, I mean, to the whole thing, to the acronym, to all the marvelous creations that people do and have being doing for decades, it seems. So I have been seen these marvelous creations, they are endless in the internet, 80k pieces, 200k pieces, 400k pieces and beyond, and I have been wondering, what happens next? I mean, these creative people build these eye-catching models and then what happens to them, the models? Some answers I know. Some models are apparently created so that the builder can then take tons of pics and sell the instructions. Makes sense! But what about those mega builds with hundreds of thousands of pieces? No one is going to make instructions for them and no sane person is going to try to recreate them. What about many MOC's that I find and that the builder is not selling any instruction? So, they build them, they photograph them, they are proud of their creation, they do not sell instructions, and then they just destroy them? Is it just for the fun of building some temporary wonder, getting recognition from the peers and then going for the next one?

Thanks. Seems promising. The title is perfect: brickficiency. I couldn't say it better. It all has to do with efficiency when buying in the maze that is Bricklink.. I will try it soon an see how much effective its efficiency is...

That is a nice tip. Now we need a way to _hide_ temporarily what is in a certain cart...

I recently started spending a lot of money in Lego sets to fulfill a desire to have my office ornamented with them. We always bought Legos for our daughters, but now I can't hide and will not hide that I am buying expensive sets FOR ME! (by expensive I mean sets of up to $250, retail price, never from parallel market). At a certain point, my wife was thinking that I was going crazy but I just told her: "It makes me happy!". I am lucky because she understands and trusts me that my madness has a point and an end. Also, despite my strong desire to assemble them myself (I am an enginner!), I let my younger daughter assemble them for me. I know she enjoys it and it is the least I can do for my family, considering how understandable they are to me... :classic: ... so far...

My rarest piece of Lego is the black door of the 4886 Designer Set (it also comes with a red door). I found that it is the same door that was used later in the Café Corner set and so, due to high demand for this set, just the door is being sold for around US$15. Crazy!

Ditto. I became addicted to Lego recently. But I have a plan. I am actually building "permanent ornaments" for my home office. I have some areas, shelves, top of cabinet, top of speakers, etc, that will hold lego sets. I don't do MOC, but I am doing some improvements to some sets, some are very simple, one so far more elaborated. My plan is to have enough legos in my office to use all those areas and so please my eyes and avoid me to use those areas with random stuff that end up messing up my office like I have always done for years. Once I run out of space in my office, I will stop buying Legos _for me_. I still have my daughters that like Lego like normal kids do and have their own sets (a few I took for me with their "authorization" :-)) and what they do with them is not of my concern. I do give them advice... I will keep buying sets for them every now and then as we have always done. As for getting bored of what I will have in my office, chances are slim. I am that kind of guy that gets "emotional" with my things and so it is unusual for me to get bored of my own things, specially when they cost me a ton of money (legos are expensive!).

I mostly did what you described. I created the Wanted Lists and chose the By Shop tab. I even created three separated wanted lists, one with the most common pieces, two others with the pieces that I know would mess up things, i.e., they were pieces not as easy to find as the others due to their colors (brown and dark green). I found one store that had almost ALL the pieces I needed but its prices were outrageous. What I missed in Bricklink was a way to "simulate", a means to do "what if's". I mean, I wanted to save a seller as if I had bought the items from him and then automatically my Wanted List would remove, or hide, those items so I could see what I could do next, and so on. I missed a way to save seller+purchase without really buying it and then, once I had all my purchases ready, each with its own seller+parts, I would buy them all. But no, I had to effectively buy ONE batch, from ONE seller, then I had to remove those items from the Wanted List manually (which is a pain), then start again the process of research, one iteration by one. But sometimes, you find out that you would be better off if some of the parts you have already bought from seller "A" would be bought from seller "C" (that you are still evaluating, or "simulating") either because this seller has a better price of because you need to increase the total value due to a buy limit imposed by the seller, etc. Although Bricklink seems to be a great tool, either I don't know it well enough yet or it could be much better. It is clumsy, complicated to learn things, can't save your cart (timing out also loses cart contents) and lacks some features that I, that just started with this MOC thing, already thought of that would be extremely helpful to us buyers. Being a website with several years of existence, I don't understand why some features that seem evident that would be highly beneficial are not implemented and, I would guess, will never be then.

Is there any good strategy when buying parts from Bricklink? I am very new to MOC, actually I have just finished my first MOC that is not really a MOC but an extension to an existing set and it used 400+ parts. Then I went to Bricklink and found it difficult to know what to do. To minimize shipping costs, one wants the fewer possible sellers but it seems that the sellers with bigger inventories are exactly the ones with higher prices overall so you win from one side and lose, sometimes much more, in the other side. Angry and upset with my inability to know what to do, which sellers to choose, I ended up buying what was possible from Pick a Brick. Then, I was still left with 100 parts to buy. I looked at those sellers with bigger inventories and better prices and then started buying from the first one, then removed all those pieces from inventory (Bricklink should have an automated way to remove from inventory parts that you have just purchased...), then choosing the next one, etc, until the last one, the last seller that had the last piece I needed,litterally. Also, the minimum amount required by many big sellers limits a lot our options. So I ended up using PAB + 5 BL sellers to buy 440 parts. Total final cost - all fees and shipping included - was around 20 cents (US$) per piece, actually a little bit higher but I could have lowered a little bit the final cost if I was not too stubborn to not want to change some things that were using expensive pieces (dark green 1x3 plate, for instance!). My question is: is there some smarter strategy when buying from Bricklink? And, lastly, do you think 20 cents (US$) per piece is too high a price, as an average, for a project.

Although we have been buying Lego products for our two daughters since 2006 (only around 2-3 products a year), I became a kind-of Lego addicted very very recently, when I decided to rebuild all the Legos my daughters had and that were disassembled, mixed, forgotten and stored in a box. So, with me sorting out the pieces and my younger daughter making the builds, we managed to rebuild them. Some pieces were missing so I found Pick a Brick and bought what I could find. Also used ebay and later I found about Bricklink. I am still waiting for some purchases to arrive. So, after building the sets and searching the internet, I found about the modular buildings and fell in love with them. But, soon I realized that I could not have the first 3 buildings. No way I will ever be paying what they are worth these days. So I have this cabinet here in my office that I then decided to use as a Lego showroom for modular buildings Well, not the cabinet, but its roof. On top of the cabinet, there is an area of roughly 71"x16" and my plan is to fill this area with the Modular Buildings atop a platform that will be slightly inclined towards the viewer. I am then building a "preview" in LDD of what I will do in this area. I have added all the modular buildings that are available (all but the first 3, since I just recently bought the now sold out Fire Brigade) and my file has now around 14k pieces..Here is what I have so far: As you can see, there is an opening, reserved for the Parisian Restaurant, and, because I have the area for just one more building and because I like the haunted house a lot (I like also its colors, they complement well the current buildings I have or will have), I added it to the layout, as a corner, since it has 3 finished sides, with a gap between it and the Palace Cinema, like if it was an alley. I am working on the Haunted House, adding some more things to integrate it better. For instance, I had to create a platform to raise it a little so that I can open it (from behind). I had to add a baseplate to make it on the same level as the other modulars, and I am adding a small cemetery, some "rocks" around it, a crooked sidewalk, more fence, and the Werewolf set. I love the tree from the Werewolf set. The haunted house has an extra 8-stud wide area to its right. That is how I have this now 14k LDD file. With the above layout, I found that I don't need any of the 3 first buildings (although I still would like A LOT to have them) which made me less sorry for not having them. The problem is that I will not have space for the future modular buildings (2015 and beyond) but that is a "problem" to be solved when the right time comes...For now I am very happy with my layout because it will cover all the area I have atop my cabinet. OK, so after this looooong introduction, what I want to tell is that I have been dealing with the buggy LDD since my file became this big. The bigger problem is that sometimes LDD will just vanish, close itself without any warning, losing any modification not saved, making me very angry. It can happen when I add something (like a baseplate!) or, the worst and more common, when I click the Save button. Instead of saving the modifications, it will vanish and lose all of them. What I have found that seems to help is to keep saving the file constantly. I think that because when you save the file it will purge the history (the undo button is grayed out), a lot of stuff that LDD has to keep track is removed from memory and then LDD would become "lighter" and "stabler". If I don't save for a while, that is prone to the "vanishing problem", specially if the Undo has some big actions in the history (like moving a big section). Also, I hide all the other houses when working in a certain house. My system is not old. It is a 4-core i7 (2600k), 16GB of RAM, etc... CPU never gets higher usage than 30-40%, usually always much lower than that (10%), so I am pretty sure my system is not to blame. I guess LDD only uses one core, not programmed for multi-core. The truth is although LDD is a great and invaluable application under some point-of-views, it just sucks under other POVs.

I was checking the model 4000007/LIT2009 Ole Kirk's House, post #3105, and found two issues: - there is one 1x4 white flat tile missing [on top and behind the bigger (front) window], shown on step 45 of book 1; - and, good news, probably due to later patches to LDD, all the 1x1 Technic bricks and their pins that were left aside can be placed correctly removing then the modified red bricks. With those fixed, the list of material matches 100% the original list. There are 909 pieces. Box says it has 910 and so I would guess that the 910th missing "piece" should be the stickers? Has to be... But there is a problem. When I compare the parts listed at Brickset with the one provided by Rebrickable, there are some problems. - Brickset lists all grey parts as Dark Stone Grey and Medium Stone Grey while Rebrickable lists them as Dark Bluish Grey and Light Bluish Grey. - Brickset lists 14 1x2 flat tiles as Transparent Brown while Rebrickable lists them as Transparent Black. My question is: are these the same colors (Dark St. Grey = Dark Bluish Grey, Medium St. Grey = Light Bluish Grey, Tr. Brown = Tr. Black)? Thanks.

I am listening to silence for some days now... Busy having fun with LDD. I wanted to post this pic in a new thread somewhere but I can't start a thread so I chose this one... The picture is called "Suicidal" I did this model (5770) in LDD myself in its entirety. It is not a modification of the one available here. I wanted to know which pieces I needed to extend a little the lighthouse tower, considering an added simple stairway that I put inside similar to the one in the first floor. I was trying to find a place for the figurine when it stuck into this suicidal position... :sweet:

Thanks! I hope I have fixed all the issues on my 1st post. You can edit it further if I missed something. Thanks also for the Ctrl-K tip. I was not aware of it.

10182 - Café Corner - Theme: Modular Buildings - LXF file - <LDD 4.3.6> Errors: Two blue 1x1x6 columns near main door were placed one stud ahead of their original place due to collision. One 1x1x1 1/3 medium grey arch brick is missing atop the side door; I could not "place" it. Main entrance six-pane door to the Café does not exist in LDD so I used the only one that does exist in the right size. The two needed 80mm outer cables do exist in LDD but they are not bendable. So I used the 64mm version that bends. I could place only 9 of the 11 white 1x4 under carriages that compose the ornament atop the main entrance door. I guess the smaller outer cable is to blame. To place the only medium stone grey tap in its required position, I had to move a 1x2 flat tile. All minifigure faces are "plain", originally. I changed them all to some non-plain faces. Some of the missing parts (grey arch brick and 2 white under carriages) are inside the building, out of easy sight, to be counted in the parts list. Also, the original parts list lists the turn tables individually, with the upper and lower parts apart. LDD has them as a set so the parts lists do not match. Note: This is my first post and it is to show my first "build" in LDD. I am new to LDD and, as an exercise to learn it, I decided to make the first set of the series Modular Buildings. I don't have the real set, unfortunately, so why not have it virtually, to get to know it better (and regret not having it even more... :-)). I started doing it not knowing about this site. When I found this forum and this thread and realized that people has already built almost all sets in existence, including the one I was doing it, I decided to keep my goal because I noticed that the one that I found here was made using LDD3 and I am using LDD4. Also, I still wanted to learn to use LDD, so why stop? Unfortunately, this set, as designed, is impossible to build. Some important parts cannot be found. Vee