How do I get a local mod to work

I tried to make a little, purely cosmetic mod, that was supposed to switch a weapon effect for another, but that didn't work. So I thought I'll build from the ground up and solely tried to change the colour and width of the advent capitalship beam.... but no matter what I try, it doesn't show up.

Here's what I did.

• I edited the settings.json and set allow_not_compatible_mods to true
• In appdata\local\sins2\mods  I created a folder with the modname.
• In that mod folder, I created the effects folder
• I copied advent_battle_capital_ship_beam_weapon_beam.beam_effect from the game's effects directory, into my mod's effects folder.
• I edited said file to change the width from 30 to 60 and the colour "ffffe1cc" to "ffffffff"
• Ingame, I activated my mod under local mods and then hit apply under manage
• for good measure I tried this with and without hitting the "only compatible mods" under the mod.io tab

And lo and behold... nothing changes about the beams ingame. What am I missing?