Armor skins
The armor's own texture, changed: what a skin is, how it is coloured, and how it goes on.
A skin is the one thing in the mod that changes the armor itself rather than adding to it. Plate, gothic, milanese, mail, chainmail, lorica, runic, hoplite, samurai, gambeson, brigandine, varangian, scale and lamellar ship with the mod; a pack adds its own.
How it is coloured
A skin is drawn once, in grey, as one master pair on vanilla’s own armor grid: humanoid.png for the helmet, chestplate and boots, humanoid_leggings.png for the belt and legs. At load the mod recolours it through eight shades taken from that armor material’s own vanilla texture, with vanilla’s panel edges and shadows mixed back over it. So a skinned iron helmet still reads as iron, gold as gold, and a modded armor material is skinned for free from the texture it already ships. No palette is authored and nothing goes out of date with a Minecraft update.
Applying one
At a smithing table or the advanced table: the skin’s template, the armor, and the armor’s own material. Re-skinning is re-forging, and it costs the metal the piece is made of. Skins are found in the world alongside the pieces, divided over the same loot groups.
Removing one
The advanced smithing table’s row for the armor itself holds its trim, its skin and its cloth; pick the skin and Remove.
Making one
The editor opens a skin workspace: the figure wearing all four slots at once, the two sheets painted in place, judged live on every material. A new skin can start from an outline, the mod’s own plate or vanilla’s where the game’s sheets are present, so it is drawn where the armor really is and the check holds it to that outline. The authoring guide has the details.