Swapping Ship Files While Keeping The Same Character

This thread is mostly aimed at those who want to make ships or use other ships, but already have a character created and feel paranoid about tampering with Starbound and losing stuff. This is an extremely simple guide on how to swap ships within the same character.

Disclaimer: Those who want to use ships made out of player blocks require (to my knowledge) the Fully Customizable Ship Mod; it is not recommended to proceed otherwise.

If there are any errors, please post them in this thread and the necessary corrections will be made.

For the sake of this tutorial, I recommend practicing with an entirely new and disposable character that you may have or create for only this purpose. Here is also an example ship file you can work with and test out whether or not you executed it correctly (Note: This is a block ship, so you may want to download what was mentioned above), located here.

1. Open up Starbound normally. Go to the player profile of the character whose ship you want to change (doesn't matter if it's single or multiplayer) and enter the game as them. Make sure you remove everything in any containers and ship lockers that you want to keep, since the new ship will not keep them. Save and quit, closing everything.

2. Locate the files for Starbound, which are inside the folders for Steam.

For Windows, the path is:

C:/Program Files/Steam/SteamApps/common/Starbound

For Macs, the path is:

Users/*you*/Library/Application Support/Steam/SteamApps/common/Starbound

Regardless of operating system, this is what the filenames should look like:

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Enter the player file, which is outlined in the picture for your convenience. This is what it should roughly look like when you first see it:

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Depending on how many character profiles you have, this list will be smaller or larger than what you see here in this example (I cut it off since it's besides the point), but the concept remains the same. Each player profile consists of 3 .bak files for the player, 3 .bak files for the ship, and most importantly: The Player File, the Shipworld File, and the Metadata file. This tutorial only requires the focus of the three aforementioned files. These files are ordered from latest use, and if you did step #1, the one at the very top is of the character whose ship you want to replace.

3. Create a new file on your desktop, and copy the Player, Shipworld, and Metadata files of the character whose ship you wish to replace. This is in case something goes horribly wrong, in which the modified files can simply be deleted and these files can be slipped right back in. This is highly recommended to do.

4. Go back to the Player file where all the player profiles are located, and find your character again, who should be at the very top. Copy the name of their ship file exactly and paste it anywhere, preferably in notepad. It is a long string of letters and numbers which match that of the other files that correspond with your character. Do not copy the .shipworld portion of it.

5. Delete the original shipworld file of that character after you have copied it's name.

6. Go to the new shipworld file you're going to replace it with and paste the name of the original shipworld file to it, and then stick it in the player file with the rest of the .player/.metadata/.shipworld files. It doesn't matter that it's not in the chronological order that it was before: The game will rectify the order for you, provided you pasted the name of the file correctly.

Close it, and run Starbound again. Look for the profile of your character, and if all goes accordingly, it should look like this:

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In the event that it fails miserably, if you saved the three files noted above in step 3, all you have to do is close the game, go back into the Player file, delete the 3 files at the very top (Meta/Player/Ship), and replace them again with the originals that you backed up seperately.

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If you have any questions or comments, feel free to state them here. I hope this helps, since I haven't really seen a clear-cut guide on how to do this. There may be some details that are wrong; if you see them, please clear them up, as not only would you be helping me, but also others who may be reading this in the near future.

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