Hi everyone!
Such a great game 
But I was completely lost when I first dipped into the .pak files… here is a small tutorial for everyone else who’s interested in modding textures and images:
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Thank you, it looks much better than the idea to download and use the CryEngine SDK, but it lacks an important point. Specifically, how do I pack the textures back, when I’m done with them?
Not sure yet 
I’m documenting while I figure it out by myself 
edit: So it seems SCTC is a modified version of texconf.exe by microsoft ( https://github.com/Microsoft/DirectXTex/releases ). It automates the process of finding splitting up Mipmaps. So once you save your modified image as .dds, you “just” have to use texconf.exe to split it up back into mipmaps.
reading C:\star-citizen-texture-converter-v1-3\globalMap_0.dds
(512x512, 8 BC1_UNORM 2D) as (512x512 R8G8B8A8_UNORM 2D)
writing C:\star-citizen-texture-converter-v1-3\globalMap_0.TIF... OK.
In this case back into “512x512, 8 BC1_UNORM 2D”.
// for reference: A lot of UI images are stored in GameData.pak\Libs\UI\Textures\
edit2:
I could be wrong, but it seems mipmap splitting is used to increase performance. So as long as the modded files are small, you can just save it as dds and name the same as the main filename (e.g. for globalMap_0.dds and globalMap_0.dds.*, just rename the file to globalMap_0.dds). Then put it (including the directory structure) back in a zip, rename the zip to pak = profit?
This seems to work for this mod: https://www.nexusmods.com/kingdomcomedeliverance/mods/224
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