Abstract While computing resources have continued to grow, methods for building and using large heuristics have not seen significant advances in recent years. We have observed that directionoptimizing breadth-first search, developed for and used broadly in the Graph 500 competition, can also be applied for building heuristics. But, the algorithm cannot run efficiently using external memory – when the heuristics being built are larger than RAM. This paper shows how to modify directionoptimizing breadth-first search to build externalmemory heuristics. We show that the new approach is not effective in state spaces with low asymptotic branching factors, but in other domains we are able to achieve up to a 3x reducing in runtime when building an external-memory heuristic. The approach is then used to build a 2.6TiB Rubik’s Cube heuristic with 5.8 trillion entries, the largest pattern database heuristic ever built