Why, he gonna explode? 
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I changed it. 
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Found something else interesting:
NMS Companions Color Guide 
Google Drive
Credits: u/Miangoco Reddit
And possibly a more complete colour guide here:
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Finally, had a enough time to jump on NMS and have a quick go.
How do you instal/apply the ‘Rounded Laser’ from the quicksilver shop to a companion? (In my case a mechanical quadruped).
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Interact with your companion (E on PC), then select Customise Appearance (or 4 on PC), then in the modifier, select the last Accessory Type (19) = Rounded Laser. Change colours as you wish.
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I’ve only got 12 accessory options…?
Maybe the mechanical ones connot have the extra few. 
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Yep. Mech-beasties can’t have the ‘Rounded Laser’s’. Only 12 options to choose from & fit on the chest only (on my beasty).
Just adopted a regular critter & they have all 19 options (2 still locked).
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Good to know they have less options. It appears that mechanical/robot like companions do behave somewhat differently to colour changes as well.
I have personally not really messed with it all that much yet. Keeping a family tree crossed my mind, but that doesn’t really make much sense with single parents laying eggs to alter.
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I’ve got 2 companions at present: the mech-beasty I mentioned earlier which is friendly but gets in the way and a young, rather ‘needy’ 6 legged, horned, wolfy-looking thing that wanders off.
I like that they sleep at your feet like a real pet, if you sit down to rest.
I can’t get much game-time in these days but I’m enjoying this exploring with a buddy.
Next time I’ll give the sequencer thing a go…
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I feel like studying the dyes for mechanicals, they are not listed yet. 
And since my formerly harmless bytebeat party planet has turned into an aggressive partycrasher planet anyway, the partycrashers can do something useful for me und become my study subjects. 
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My first pet, a roughly player-sized tauntaun-ish creature from one of my base worlds, already had a desired color scheme. The guide proved very useful for my second pet though. I started with a giant dull-colored strider from another base planet, and made its offspring a lovely “suit-creature”-matching red. Results will vary from the charts though, as the original creature’s markings play a significant role. For instance, I used carbon to dye my strider, but it has barely a hint of blue. Other random creatures I experimented with carbon on ended up with very prominent blue stripes/scales/etc.
Apparently both the robots & the Garthim-like golem creatures use their own sets of color palettes, different from the rest, so those are two areas worth exploring.
Some cool techy info… I’ve explored the pet data in the save files a bit. It seems a few properties, like gender & default name, are procedurally generated based on what appears to be a timestamp of the creature’s spawn/adoption. All of the animal model’s specific sub-parts are explicitly listed, so I’m guessing it’s possible to completely customize the pet’s appearance by modifying those entries. I didn’t have a list of valid part names handy though, so I haven’t tested that yet. The coloring seems to be specified as a procedural seed, not RGB values. I’ve tried substituting some arbitrary values into it and my pets’ palettes did indeed change in unpredictable ways. I haven’t tested it in multiplayer, but if it works like ship seeds then others should also see the changes. So coloring is also probably far more customizable beyond the in-game materials, but would be a lot of blind trial-and-error.
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Okay. By garthim do you mean the ones that look like steampunk fossil beetles?
At closer look (from a respectful distance), the creature I returned to, that I thought was a robot, turned out to be a fossil beetle. So I still don’t have a test subject, but I’ll keep looking in red star systems. Or, if I find a fossil beetle I like, I’ll experiment with it as well.
Is it possible to hatch eggs prematurely? My first mutated egg says 24h but it’s interactable… 
And why does everything in the middle breeding slots say unstable? Does it mean they cannot precalculate (and put into words) what the outcome will be?
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Here’s a reddit post with screens of golem & robot types: https://old.reddit.com/r/NMSCoordinateExchange/comments/lwmdt1/rock_creature_and_robots/
If you try to hatch an egg early I believe it just gives a warning message. I think the inability to “put into words” is probably the best explanation for the “unstable” label.
From my observations so far, the sequencer is procedural (appropriately enough), yielding consistent results based on inputs. For the dye injector, specific materials always yield the same color combos for most creature types (as shown above). I don’t know how % factors into it though, I’ve always put 100% worth in. The gene splitter, on the other hand, seems entirely dependent on the %. Specific mutations (if any) always occurred at the same %, regardless of what materials I used.
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The offspring of my darkgreen mushroom hatched into a beautiful teal mushroom with cute pink flowers. 
Riverpito the girl-mushroom. The description said very large, but it’s the same size as the parent. Or… is it still growing? I didn’t put anything into the character slot, so they are equally friendly.
In other news, I found a planet with two types of mechanicals. 
They are the best. 
Here you see me and Riverpito check out the beautiful horsies!
PS: the teal-and-pink colour stems from antimatter in the dye slot
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Oh shoot I tamed a baby robot! 
I can ride it but the umbrella collides with my backpack.
I need to know… do these guys grow if it says “young” and all the others on the planet are larger, or do I need to tame a larger “elder”?
It would be cool to be under the umbrella when riding, and they are fast (Coordinates: 20c4f9f0d6c3).
PS: robot dyes from Reddit https://i.redd.it/s59r23gof9l61.png
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No. I was hoping they would. Must use the egg sequencer to make them larger or smaller.
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Interesting, because I have been reading about pets growing in size as they age, although they appear to reach max size slower (2 weeks or so) than they reach maturity and ability to reproduce (1 week). Time being real time as well, so takes quite a while. I even read somewhere that growth speed is related to parent size, with small creatures growing/maturing faster than bigger ones.
Then again, don’t take my word for it, as I have no clue, other than reading about it in various places.
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Hmmmm, so that is interesting. None of mine have grown. I will keep an eye on my smallest one.
Edit. Saw one report that it takes 15 days.
I have a question though because one of my kiddos was able to hatch an egg after 3 days…but I released him.
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…sounds much nicer than ‘abandon’.
I’d prefer it if the option was something like ‘return to wild’ or ‘release’.
Abandon seems cold & heartless. 
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There are two different situations where the question of growth may have different answers:
- Adopting a wild pet whose scan says “young” at time of adoption.
- versus hatching a pet from an egg.
Wild animals spawn and despawn, I never managed to watch the same young one long enough to notice it grow. But the hatched ones are more permanent and we can “study” them.
Yes. Take it back to its home world at least 
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