so about a 3-4 days ago of writing this i decided to reinstall Starbound via Steam and once it was finished it wouldn't launch. after poking around on the internet i managed to find a solution with one problem: NO MODS. long story short i refound a few mods, Extracted, put them in the mod folder, started the game and nothing. After organizing, reorganizing and figureing out what was going on i found out only mods with the ".pak" were working. im about at my wits end with this can anyone tell me how to get non-".pak" mods to work. and again if my little rant made it confusing, the ONLY mods that seem to work for me are .pak files and im willing to bet the same is true for mods im subscribed to on Steam workshop. can anyone tell me how to get the mods that aren't pak files to work so i can use the Steam link again. oh and as far as i know none of the mods are outdated.
I guarantee your issues have absolutely nothing with a file being packed or not. a packed or unpacked mod is the same thing to the game. You can unpack every packed mod you're using successfully, and every one will work the same. Here is where you learn "correlation does not imply causation" etc. What you have is probably just one(maybe more?) among your already unpacked mods that is 1. Outdated 2. The mod author screwed up something 3. The download is corrupted You can try one at at time, or better yet just refer to your \starbound\storage\starbound.log which almost certainly holds the answer.
