LEGO World Builder for Nintendo 3DS

A native Nintendo 3DS port of LEGO World Builder, the Shockwave strategy game published on LEGO.com in the early 2000s.

The original was a Macromedia Director title: an isometric world where you scout terrain, uncover build plans, gather resources and assemble vehicles and buildings to complete each mission's goals. It went offline with the rest of LEGO's Shockwave catalogue when browser plugins died, and it has not been playable in a browser for many years.

This port reimplements the game in C against the 3DS hardware, working from the decompiled Director scripts as the reference for behaviour. It is not an emulator and not a wrapper: the map display, plan and goal handling, resource model and vehicle logic were rebuilt to match what the original code does.

Credits

LEGO World Builder was created by Gamelab for The LEGO Group. All of the game's design, artwork, music and sound are their work, and this port would not exist without it. Gamelab closed in 2009.

LEGO® is a trademark of The LEGO Group, which does not sponsor, authorise or endorse this project. This is an unofficial, non-commercial fan port.

The original game files were recovered from the BioMedia Project, which has preserved LEGO's Shockwave catalogue for years.

Getting it

Grab the newest release. Two files, and you only need one:

File	What to do with it
legowb3ds.cia	Install it with FBI. It appears on the HOME menu with its own icon.
legowb3ds.3dsx	Copy it to sdmc:/3ds/ and start it from the Homebrew Launcher.

Either needs a 3DS running custom firmware. Everything the game needs is packed inside, so there is nothing else to copy across.

The two screens

The bottom screen is the world: the isometric map, scrollable and touchable. The top screen is the sidebar the original kept to the right of the play area — the selected tile, your inventory of plans and resources, and mission goals.

Controls

In a mission:

Button	Action
D-pad, Circle Pad	Scroll the map, a tile at a time as the original's scroll buttons do
Touch	Tap a tile to select it, drag to scroll. Tap a pile to see its bricks
L	Act with the selected unit: pick up, drop, build. On a factory, cycles its colour
B	Cancel, and dismiss a goal popup
X	Disassemble what is selected
Y	Show or hide the info panel for the selected tile
R, Select	Open the plan menu
Start	Menu

On the world select screen:

Button	Action
L, ZL	Previous world
R, ZR	Next world
D-pad	Point at a mission, showing its name
A	Play the mission pointed at
Touch	Tap a mission to play it, or an arrow to change world
Select	Show your licence, once you have earned it

World 1 Mission 1 runs the original's tutorial. Its bubble's buttons are A and B, and Start leaves it.

There is a cheat, entered the way you would expect a game from that era to want it.

Progress is saved to sdmc:/legowb3ds/save.txt.

Building it

You need devkitPro with devkitARM, libctru, citro3d, citro2d and the 3DS tools (tex3ds, 3dsxtool, smdhtool). On Linux:

dkp-pacman -S 3ds-dev
make -j"$(nproc)"

That produces legowb3ds.3dsx, and then legowb3ds.cia via bannertool and makerom. Windows builds of both are in tools/; on anything else, point the makefile at your own:

make MAKEROM=/path/to/makerom BANNERTOOL=/path/to/bannertool

gfx/*.t3s and the PNGs beside them are compiled into texture atlases by tex3ds during the build and land in romfs/gfx, so that directory is generated rather than committed. They rebuild byte for byte from the sources.

Reproducing a particular build

The build is deterministic: the same sources and the same toolchain give the same bytes. Built with devkitARM r67.1, libctru 2.7.0, citro3d 1.7.1 and citro2d 1.7.0, this tree reproduces the 3dsx and the SMDH of the original release exactly.

CI pins devkitpro/devkitarm:20260221, which matches on everything except citro2d, where it carries 1.6.0. That is worth about eight hundred bytes in the 3dsx. The game is the same either way; only the bytes differ.

The CIA is a separate matter. It carries debug information recording the absolute path it was built from, so two builds of the same sources in two different directories produce two different CIAs. Stripping the debug sections from both leaves the ELFs identical.

Releasing

Push a tag beginning with v. The release workflow builds through the same path as every other build and publishes the 3dsx and the CIA against that tag.

git tag v1.0.0
git push origin v1.0.0

State of the port

Playable and complete enough to finish missions, with known gaps. PORTING_NOTES.md describes the rule the port is built on: when the port and the original disagree, the original wins unless the hardware forces a documented deviation.

Licence

The port's own code, everything under source/ and include/, is offered for anyone to read, build and learn from.

The game's data — the artwork in gfx/, and the audio and map files in romfs/ — is LEGO's and Gamelab's, included here so the port is playable. No ownership of it is claimed and none is transferred. If The LEGO Group would rather it were not distributed, it will be taken down.