Coral Island Retexture Guide

SlugGirl · October 28

Coral Island Retexture Guide

Programs you’ll need before you start:

Unrealpakbat - file attached to this guide

Original farmer's outfit and the new retextured outfit from this guide.

Before we start, you’ll need to follow this guide to get your AES Keys to be able to view the game files.

Now, download Unreal Engine. To do this you’ll need to download the Epic Games Launcher, once you’ve done this and logged in or created a new account, navigate to the ‘Unreal Engine’ tab and click the ‘Install’ button to download the version of Unreal Engine you need.

For Coral Island, it was created using Unreal Engine 4.27 so that’s the version I’ll download and install. Once it’s ready it’ll now be in your ‘Library’. Now that’s done, leave this open as we’ll come back to it later, but we’ll move on to the next steps.

Now download the correct version of UE Viewer for your machine, I use Windows so I’ll download that version.

Once you’ve downloaded it, open it up and under ‘Path to game files:’ navigate to where you have the game on your machine, so you can set up the file path for UModel. You need to set it up so it goes to your ‘Paks’ folder within the game files. For me, it’s: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Coral Island\ProjectCoral\Content\Paks

Once you’ve set up your file path to the ‘Paks’ folder, you’ll see a check box underneath the file path section. Tick ‘Override game detection’ and then from the dropdown underneath, you’ll need to select ‘Unreal engine 4’ and in the dropdown to the side of that, you’ll need to select the correct version of Unreal that the game was created with. For Coral Island, this will be ‘Unreal engine 4.27’.

Once you have set those up you can click ‘OK’. This will open a new window where you’ll have to enter your AES Keys (you can learn how to get AES Keys in this guide here). Copy and paste them into the box and then click ‘OK’ again.

Once you’ve done that, UModel will open a new window that gives you access to all the game files.

For retextures, we’ll need to navigate to ‘ProjectCoral’

When you click the arrow next to it, it’ll open up and you’ll see a lot of folders within that main ‘ProjectCoral’ one.

For this example, let’s navigate to ‘Characters’>’Human’>’Player’>’CharacterCustomizerV2’>’Clothes’>’FarmersOutfit’

If you click on ‘FarmersOutfit’ you’ll see three SK_ files, these are the models for the outfit. For example, if you click the first one ‘SK_FarmersOutfit_Female.uasset’, it’ll load up the model for you to see. (Also see gif 9 attached)

As I mentioned though, for this tutorial we’ll be keeping it simple and focusing on retextures for now. So from ‘FarmersOutfit’ we’ll click the arrow and navigate to ‘Texture’

When you click on ‘Textures’ you’ll see a bunch of T_ files, these are all the different texture files for this outfit. The _D at the end of the file name means Diffuse, which is the colour map.

If you click on one, for example, I’ve clicked ‘T_FarmersOutfit_01_D.uasset’, it will load up the texture file for you to see. For some reason it loads it as a cube, I’ll be honest I’m not sure why it does that. But when you export it’ll export as a normal TGA file. (Also see gif 10 & 11 attached)

From this window we click ‘Tools’>’Export current object’. A new window will open, in this window you’ll need to select your file path for where you want to save your exported texture file. For ease, let’s export it to our Desktop and then from there I’ll add ‘\FarmersOutfit’ so it’ll create a new folder on my Desktop for this.

You’ll see your new folder on your Desktop. Open this main folder and then inside it, click through all the containing folders until you eventually get to the diffuse texture file you exported. (See gif 12 attached)

Open your diffuse texture file in whatever program you prefer, I’ll use Paint.net for this as it’s free to use.

Once it loads up, you can edit however you’d like, change the colours, add a pattern, etc.

Here I’ll just quickly change the colour so we can see the change easily in the game. Using the ‘Magic Wand’ tool, I’ll select the parts I want to change the colour of. Then I’ll navigate to ‘Adjustments’>’Hue / Saturation’.

Once you’re happy with your edits, go to ‘File’>’Save As’ and overwrite the existing TGA file.

You’ll see that your edit has overwritten the original file in your ‘FarmersOutfit’ file on your Desktop.

Now remember the Epic Games Launcher you left open from the start of this tutorial? We’re finally going back to it, so open it up and click ‘Launch’ on ‘Unreal Engine 4.27’.

(It might take a short while, so sit tight).

When it finally loads on your ‘Projects’ screen you’re going to want to select ‘Games’ and then click ‘Next >’

On the next screen pick ‘Blank’ and then ‘Next >’ again.

On the ‘Project Settings’ screen, name your project whatever you want. It’ll by default be called ‘MyProject’, but I’d recommend giving it the name you called your export folder, so you can easily keep track of it all. So I’ll rename mine to ‘FarmersOutfit’ and then I’ll click ‘Create Project’.

Again sit tight as this might take a short while to load again. Once it has loaded, we’ll need to set up our file paths exactly as it is set up in our ‘FarmersOutfit’ export folder on our Desktop. It’s really important we set them up exactly the same way, otherwise our mod won’t work.

We’ll create the file path folders in the ‘Content Browser’ tab of Unreal Engine.

To do this you can do it one of two ways, you can either right-click in the ‘Content Browser’ tab and from the options we’ll select ‘New Folder’. Or you can click on the green ‘Add/Import’ button and again from the options, select ‘New Folder’.

We need to name this folder ‘ProjectCoral’ so it matches our original file path. Which is: ProjectCoral\Characters\Human\PLAYER\CharacterCustomizerV2\Clothes\FarmersOutfit\Texture

Click into your new ‘ProjectCoral’ file and repeat the process by adding your new folder and naming it the next section of your file path. Click in that folder and repeat until you’ve added all your files. (It is tedious I know).

Once that is done your file setup in Unreal is going to look like this:

Inside the ‘Texture’ folder we can now drag and drop our recoloured Farmers Outfit TGA file. (See gif 26 attached)

Now it’s just a good habit to ‘Save All’ under the ‘File’ so that we know it’s definitely there and loaded in.

You’ll know if it has been saved because the small silver star on your TGA file will disappear.

Now that’s done, we can navigate back to the ‘File’ and then ‘Package Project’ and then in the list that appears we select ‘Supported Platforms…’

A new window will open and you need to make sure you have ‘Windows (64-bit)’ ticked. Once it is you can close that window and you won’t need to do this step again in future.

Now we navigate back to ‘File’ and from there select ‘Cook Content for Windows’.

Whilst that’s cooking in the background, we need to complete some other steps, so that we can manually cook this too. There’s a lot of similarities when it comes to Unreal modding, but every now and again an Unreal game will need a couple of extra steps. Coral Island for example needs to be manually cooked as well.

We’re going to create a new folder and name it ‘zFarmersOutfit_P’. We add the ‘z’ so it puts the pak we’re creating at the bottom of the load order for the game. The ‘_P’ makes the game think it’s a patch.

Inside this new folder we want to recreate the file path from the game files. So our first new folder will be ‘ProjectCoral’ again, then ‘Content’. However, inside the ‘Content’ we’re going to need to set this up differently, yes confusing, I know.

Remember when you originally set up your project for Unreal? Navigate to where that is saved, I left it as the default so for me it’ll be: C:\Users\Sarah\Documents\Unreal Projects\FarmersOutfit

Inside that folder we’re going to navigate to ‘Saved’>’Cooked’>’WindowsNoEditor’>’FarmersOutfit’>’Content’

Inside the ‘Content’ folder you’ll see several files, the only one we want and need is the ‘ProjectCoral’ folder.

Right-click and copy this folder and navigate back to your ‘Content’ folder in your ‘zFarmersOutfit_P’ file, and paste that ‘ProjectCoral’ folder you copied into it. Your new file path should look something like this: C:\Users\Sarah\Desktop\zFarmersOutfit_P\ProjectCoral\Content\ProjectCoral\Characters\Human\PLAYER\CharacterCustomizerV2\Clothes\FarmersOutfit\Texture and inside the ‘Texture’ file, you’ll see the following files:

Now we just need to manually cook the mod. To do that download the ‘unrealpakbat’ file we have attached to this guide, and I’d recommend saving it within your ‘Win64’ folder of your ‘UE_4.27’ folder. The file path will look like this: C:\Program Files\Epic Games\UE_4.27\Engine\Binaries\Win64

For ease of access, I’d recommend right-clicking the ‘unrealpakbat’ file and selecting ‘Create shortcut’. Then drag that shortcut onto your Desktop so that it’ll create a shortcut for you. It just saves you from having to dig through a bunch of files each time you create and cook a new mod.

Now you have that setup, drag and drop your ‘zFarmersOutfit_P’ file onto your ‘unrealpakbat’ shortcut. A new window will open and once it’s done it will say ‘Press any key to continue…’, press any key and you’ll see your new ‘zFarmersOutfit_P.pak’ file. (See gif 33 attached)

I know what you’re thinking “Wow, we’re finally done!”, and I would love to say yes, I really would. But no, we’re not quite done yet. As Coral Island has an AES key, it means the game has a .sig file, a .sig file is a coded file that puts the AES key on the .pak file. So in order to have our mod work, we’ll need to create a .sig file for our new ‘zFarmersOutfit_P.pak’ file.

So lets navigate to: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Coral Island\ProjectCoral\Content\Paks inside your ‘Paks’ folder you’ll see the following .pak and .sig files

What we need to do is move our ‘zFarmersOutfit_P.pak’ file here, copy the ‘ProjectCoral-WindowsNoEditor.sig’ file and rename it ‘zFarmersOutfit_P.sig’

Now there’s one final step left before we can check the mod is working in the game. Open Steam, navigate to your ‘Library’, then to ‘Coral Island’. Right-click on ‘Coral Island’ and select ‘Properties’