Vintage Story Wiki

How Schematics was built

Raw game files read

Processing

A schematic is a pre-built block layout (worldgen/schematics/**/*.json) that world generation pastes into the world. Each file is one page here, and structures only reference them, by path or glob, together with their own weight and quantity for that reference.

The page data comes from reading each file once, without parsing its large block arrays: the bounding-box size, and the small BlockCodes and ItemCodes dictionaries (the block and item codes it uses; ItemCodes holds items placed in containers, such as the stackrandomizer-* placeholders). Which structures use a file is the reverse of those references.

The 3D view

For the 3D view the whole file is needed, so every schematic is also written, gzip-compressed (about a fifth of the original size), to the site and served as /assets/schematics/world/<domain>/<path>.json.gz. The schematic viewer fetches one on demand (?schematic=<domain>/<path>) and unpacks it in your browser with the browser's built-in DecompressionStream. Nothing is decoded at build time beyond the tapestry, clutter and book cross-references described on their own source pages.

Each schematic page also embeds a read-only preview (rotate, pan and zoom, nothing else) drawn from the same file; the big ones wait until you ask for them. meta-filler blocks are a worldgen marker rather than part of the finished structure, so they are left out of the preview and start hidden in the full viewer (where you can turn them on from the block list).

The decoding, voxel conversion and 3D rendering code lives in the repository's vs-schematic package (TypeScript, compiled for the browser at build time), separate from this wiki, so the same code also drives a VS Code extension that previews schematic files.

One schematic at a time. A village is made of many schematics that the game places by its own rules; those layout rules aren't part of the data, so a structure is shown as the list of its pieces, not as an assembled whole. The files belong to the game and the mods that ship them.

Pipeline code