GECS Relationships in Godot 4.3+

Express links between entities as first-class pairs in GECS v9. A Relationship connects a Source Entity to a Target through a Relation Component. Relationships support arbitrary metadata, stacked instances (e.g. poison stacks), wildcard queries, and graduated cleansing.

Addon: GECS · version v9 · Godot 4.3+ · MIT
Related skills: gecs-core for primitives, gecs-queries for relationship queries, gecs-observers for .on_relationship_added().

1. Anatomy of a Relationship

A relationship consists of 3 elements:

1. Source: The entity that owns the relationship.
2. Relation: A Component instance defining the relationship type (e.g., R_ChildOf, R_Attacking).
3. Target: One of three target types:
   • Entity: Linking two entities (e.g., attacker -> target).
   • Component Instance: Storing link-attached data directly on the relationship (e.g., unit -> C_Burning.new(10.0)).
   • Archetype / Class Type: Categorical tagging (e.g., unit -> Food).