With Perl it is possible to re-order (sort) any list of stuff according to a set of sorting rules. Of course things like "a"<"b" are the easiest (letter a is less than letter b). But this can be arbitrarily complex.

I took your Template as the "sorting rules". Shuffled that array, then applied the sorting rules to arrive back at the input array. I have no idea of what you are trying to do. Your description was not understandable to me. But Perl can re-order (order) anything as long as you can describe what the ordering rules are.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;
use List::Util qw(shuffle);

my $sort_order=<<END;
unitname
tooltip
verbosetooltip
race
buildtime
officercost
crewcost
dilithiumcost
latinumcost
metalcost
biomattercost
maxHealth
curHealth
healthrate
maxshield
curShield
shieldrate
maxSpecialEnergy
specialEnergyRate
specialenergydisplaymode
END

#generate sorting rules...

my $i=0;
my %sort_order = map{$_ => $i++}split ' ',$sort_order;

my @keys = shuffle keys %sort_order; # shuffle not really needed,
                                     # but adds some credibility as to
                                     # the random nature of output

print "SHUFFLED ARRAY...\n";  # randomized array
print join("\n",@keys),"\n";

print "\n","RE-ORDERED ARRAY BY SORTING RULES\n";
print "THIS IS NOT A COPY OF THE INPUT ARRAY\n";
@keys = sort{$sort_order{$a} <=> $sort_order{$b}}@keys;
print join("\n",@keys),"\n";

__END__
SHUFFLED ARRAY...
shieldrate
officercost
maxHealth
race
curHealth
metalcost
curShield
verbosetooltip
latinumcost
healthrate
biomattercost
unitname
dilithiumcost
maxSpecialEnergy
specialenergydisplaymode
tooltip
specialEnergyRate
buildtime
crewcost
maxshield

RE-ORDERED ARRAY BY SORTING RULES
THIS IS NOT A COPY OF THE INPUT ARRAY
unitname
tooltip
verbosetooltip
race
buildtime
officercost
crewcost
dilithiumcost
latinumcost
metalcost
biomattercost
maxHealth
curHealth
healthrate
maxshield
curShield
shieldrate
maxSpecialEnergy
specialEnergyRate
specialenergydisplaymode

Process completed successfully
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