Six Seven (relatively) simple changes I think would improve the experience of yassifying your vessel. Some of these tie into each other.
1. Paintbrush Menu
Right now, some parts of the ship, such as brig sails, are a major paint to paint. To solve this, just have the paintbrush open a menu that lets us repaint our ship from the comfort of our helms, or just include the paintbrush menu in the shipyard that checks if you own a brush when you open it.
2. Allow us to recolor more stuff
Let us paint all the hull armor. No clue why we haven’t been able to do this, but with the advent of that iron trim or whatever the hell is the current best armor, making a decent-looking ship is even more mildly annoying than ever before.
3. Vanity Hull Armor
You know how players can wear a big ass suit of armor and hide it with the click of a button, while replacing it with a loincloth made of bear skin and an American flag baseball cap? Why not allow us to do the same with ships, especially for the poor souls who use archaic hulls? A little eye icon would appear on the hull armor slot in the shipyard menu. Clicking it would allow the user to insert a hull armor of their choice that would actually show up there.
4. Sail Pattern Painting
Dyers are infuriating to deal with, especially for sail patterns. You sail all the way to Ravenna or to some random guild’s island claim and pay an absurd sum to recolor your exotic sail pattern, only to find it looks like shit when you actually equip it. Simply let us paint our sail patterns using the paintbrush menu. This would function like a dyer shop but without the costs and tedium.
5. Shipyard Loadouts
For those of us who have purchased the overpriced-to-kingdom-come gear loadouts pass, allow us to swap ship loadouts. Speed and combat are currently mutually exclusive, and a lot of us would benefit from easily being able to swap between them. Could (and probably should) also include cosmetics, including paint.
6. Hull armor equip should not damage the hull
Upon equipping hull armor, the ship should not have a further damaged hull. Instead, just make it percentage based. If I’m at fifty percent durability and change my hull armor, I’ll still be 50% durability. In order to not screw with repair costs, repair costs should be percentage based as well. To repair my half-broken hull after a run-in with Fort Talos, I’ll have to pay the same amount regardless of if I have 12k or 22k durability on my brig. Lesser boats will have lower repair costs.
7. Rugs and curtains and whatever the fuck should actually make sense
Can the colors on the fabric parts please actually match the menu? I’m tired of clicking through every color to get the one I want when I’m repainting.