It's weird no-one's brought up https://starsector.fandom.com/wiki/Intro_to_Modding yet, so here's me, bringing up https://starsector.fandom.com/wiki/Intro_to_Modding
Lol I chuckled at this, but yeah it truly is a good guide though!
First of all, thank you! I put a (relative) lot of my time into those sprites. I've tried reading that guide, but after modding ships, i'm stuck at the part where you actually put them into the 'world', so to speak. So i thought i'd ask someone who's more knowledgeable than me, to get these sprites to be an actual ship in the game, before delving into the Discord. Thanks for your reply!
Besides the guides, you can make sure the game is correctly loading your .ship and .variant files by putting the game into "dev mode" which allows you to check variants under the "Edit Variants" section at the bottom of the start screen- which is otherwise not available as an option. This also allows you to create simulations with those variants to test balance.
Go to: starsector\starsector core\data\config\settings.JSON and change: "devMode":false, to: "devMode":true,
As general advice: start small.
Look under: data\hulls\ship_data.JSON -(you can open it with a spreadsheet editor or notepad but an editor makes it easier to read and therefore better understand each ship stat)
That will give you an idea of of all the stats a ship should have and give you some guidance on how to balance yours.
I also highly recommend the
Ship Editor to make your .ship file and .variant files.
After downloading and running the application, the right side will show you all the commands you can use to build those files. I'm honestly not sure if a guide exists on all its functionality though, but I can tell you that it will prove to be invaluable for many things regarding ship creation. And of course if you have specific questions or run into problems you can ask here or on the discord.
If you're having trouble or it feels overwhelming, let me know and I will provide a demo mod with one of your sprites (you can pick) so you will have a specific example to go off of.