Skin previews

[Aesteryiix]

Is there any chance we'll ever get the opportunity to preview skins for items in the game?
In the long list of skins for things like night armor skins or football helmet skins, I'd really love for there to be an option to preview it on an actual character rather than try to look it up in hopes that it's online somewhere and it's always quite a hassle :')

I'd really like an option to see both the icon for an item skin, what it looks like on a character, and then a button to compare it to the original or even cross-compare between 2 different skins for the same item. I think that'd be pretty neat! (It'd be preferred for a button to cycle between it being on a person or not, and then another for if its the original skin/chosen compared skin or not!) I think it'd make sense if the way it chooses a character is the same as the one in your portrait?

[Echsrick]

yea, theres 1 football helmet skin that looks like just a headband kind of thing and it looks bad on some characters where its like floating halfway

[crushcircuit]

oh my god please

maybe for stuff like football helmets it could use the same system as the emotes and stuff, where you can preview an equip item on a character of your choice and cycle through them. that would be sooo cool

[SpuddyBuddy]

9 minutes ago, crushcircuit said:

oh my god please

maybe for stuff like football helmets it could use the same system as the emotes and stuff, where you can preview an equip item on a character of your choice and cycle through them. that would be sooo cool

This seems like a really good way to go about it!

[CameoAppearance]

12 minutes ago, crushcircuit said:

oh my god please

maybe for stuff like football helmets it could use the same system as the emotes and stuff, where you can preview an equip item on a character of your choice and cycle through them. that would be sooo cool

Sounds good to me!

[Zinnie]

KLEI please implement this!! This could probably boost sales a bit as well, when it's this easy to see what it is in the preview

[Zinnie]

Screw it, I made a mod of it.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3692753195

Please post feedback if there's any changes needed here, hope it works fine!

[AveHortor]

2 hours ago, Zinnie said:

Screw it, I made a mod of it.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3692753195

Please post feedback if there's any changes needed here, hope it works fine!

This mod is amazing. You did in 5 hours what Klei has not in 10 years.

[Zinnie]

Thanks @AveHortor!! There's some drawbacks I've noticed with how this works, I posted a comment on the workshop but I'll post it here too:

There's two inherent problems with this;

1) Many helmets look off sometimes. I tried fixing it many times but the hat seems to always appear too high, too low, or clipping through the character’s head. It's because the hat’s position is entirely determined by a fixed anchor bone for each character’s animation skeleton by Klei.

A single anchor point doesn’t produce a perfect fit for everyone. It's not a bug in the mod, it’s an inherent limitation of DST’s animation system that affects all UI-based skin previews (we call them SkinPuppet as I've gathered). The SkinPuppet is the same one used in Klei’s own Wardrobe and Curio Cabinet screens as well. There just doesn't seem to be any Lua API available to adjust per-character hat offsets at the symbol level.asd

2) The AccountItemFrame widget that I WANT to use for the "original" skin preview, works perfectly for displaying actual skins because their animation builds are preloaded through the skin registry, but there is no way to display the base/default version of a skinnable item using the same widget, because base item builds are not loaded into memory in the front-end. They seemingly only become available when a world is active?.. The Assets table in mods also doesn't appear to load .zip animation builds in the front-end context. This makes it impossible for mods (or even the base game's UI) to show a proper side-by-side comparison of a skin versus its original item in menu screens like the Collection/Curio Cabinet, since the only fallback I've managed to do is the inventory item texture.

A potential fix would be adding the base/default item as an entry in PREFAB_SKINS with its build registered in the skin system, but that would be on Klei to do, I can't do anything about that. I'm also very new to this so my understanding is limited with how everything works, I could be completely off with all this but this is just what I've managed to gather. I'm not sure where or how to ask Klei to open / alter their API or game engine for stuff like this either so I'll have to research a bit..

[hhh2]

On 3/27/2026 at 6:14 PM, Zinnie said:

alter their API or game engine for stuff like this either so I'll have to research a bit..

 

On 3/27/2026 at 6:14 PM, Zinnie said:

I'm also very new

Did you know some time ago there was a malicious Workshop addon that unraveled many player's skin.  I think Klei's engineers would be afraid of opening the gates to that kind of attack anymore.

 

[Zinnie]

5 hours ago, hhh2 said:

 

Did you know some time ago there was a malicious Workshop addon that unraveled many player's skin.  I think Klei's engineers would be afraid of opening the gates to that kind of attack anymore.

 

I actually didn't know that, that sounds awful honestly. Horrible people who would make something like that

I completely understand why Klei would be resistant when you mention this. However, also selectively allowing some access which isn't to do with skins (in this case it's just allowing us to load game data, such as the normal default textures) wouldn't be too bad, hopefully. 

On the contrary, allowing us to force load default assets could actually bring a whole world of modding to our doorstep, when we can tell the engine to load specific things like this! 

Edited March 30 by Zinnie