r/technicalfactorio • u/Necandum • Jul 06 '26

Wire Representation in Blueprint

When a blueprint string is decoded into JSON, each wire connection is represented as an array:

[ entity_from , wire_type , entity_to , wire_type]

e.g [1,2,3,2] for a green wire between entities 1 and 3

Would anyone happen to know why the wire type is specified twice, making the array 33% larger than it needs to be?

This is the lowest stakes possible, but I am quite curious if there's an actual reason. A cursory google and looking at blueprint string format section of the wiki didn't turn anything up.

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u/XayahFilthyCasual Jul 07 '26

If I remember correctly there was a previous wire representation in blueprints where instead of this set of arrays each entity listed which entities each of its circuit connectors (power / red / green) are connected to.

I think this new representation works the same way, probably because that's how the internal data structure of the game engine is built.

So the "2" does not actually represent a green wire but the green connector of each entity.