hello i'm old player of starbound. took a few years off of playing the game so i need to relearn alot anyway i wanted to know if theres a way to change the skin of a ship with another or its not as simple as that [side question]: do ships have any new gameplay elements? o:
What exactly are you wanting to do? Change your ship from one race to another? Or change it to a completely custom design?
By changing the skin I assume that means you don't also want to change the layout. The answer should be fairly obvious if you unpack the assets and look in /ships/<whateverSpecies>/ They're just PNG files. The most simple path is to simply replace them by your mod having replacement PNG files with the same path and filename. If you wanted to also change the layout, you'd need to edit the blockImage (also a PNG file) where every pixel counts for 1 tile and each RGBA combination is mapped to a particular combination of foreground tiles, background tiles, objects, and a few other options as defined in the blockKey.