My patience has run out as everything I did bore no fruits. I'm playing with X:CE plus almost every mod in the mod pack and a bunch that aren't in the modpack like the armor replacer. By looking at such mods I could get a decent idea of what to do to change those awful looking weapon tiers. I handpicked some images I found on the internet and edited them so they had the right dimensions, extension, a transparent background etc. That took me a lot of time. Then I tried:
1) Swapping the ones inside the assets/weapons folders after making a backup but that changed nothing (same filenames of course). The game was still using default graphics for guns.
2) Changed the ones inside /assets/gui/weapons but that did nothing either. Changed the ones inside gui/weapons/small too after making versions with dimensions that would fit. Nothing.
At this point I thought XCE might have been taking precedence but XCE doesn't mess with weapon graphics so that makes no sense. So I tried:
3) Making a weapons folder inside the xce folder, which also didn't help.
4) Putting my guns on the gui/weapons and gui/weapons/small folders inside the xce folder. Nope.
And finally:
5) Making and then installing my own mod after looking at other gun and armor replacers. The game simply ignores it and keeps using default guns.
So my question is: WHAT THE F*** AM I DOING WRONG AND WHERE IS THE GAME TAKING THESE GUNS FROM EVEN AFTER I DELETED EVERY GUN GRAPHIC FOR TESTING PURPOSES.