Question

I have a base array of 6 different words that represent game elements. Just wondering how I would multiply the number of instances of each word within the array.

var gameItem = [cattle, wood, stone, metal, grain, craft];

That is, say I want 10 instances of each word to be added to the array, how would I do that? Order isn’t important as it’ll be shuffled.

Answer 1

Don’t forget that your array doesn’t work unless you define each of those variable. But as I understand, those are words, not vars. So the right array declaration is:

var newGameItem = ["cattle", "wood", "stone", "metal", "grain", "craft"]

To repeat that array 10 times, you can use a for loop and the array method concat().

var newGameItem = [];
for(var i=0 ; i<10 ; i++) {
    newGameItem = newGameItem.concat(gameItem);
}

> newGameItem : ["cattle", "wood", "stone", "metal", "grain", "craft", "cattle" ... ]

I don’t know what is your idea for this, but, if you want to store a quantity of elements of those kinds, like, player has 1 cattle, 12 wood, 20 stone, etc …
You probably should have a better data structure, like this:

 var gameItem = {"cattle" : 1, "wood" : 12, "stone" : 20, "metal" : 0, "grain" : 0, "craft" : 0 };

So by doing gameItem.wood, you get the result > 12