No Man’s Sky: How to use the Egg Sequencer

Despite being over six years old, Hello Games continues to provide excellent support and fresh updates for No Man's Sky. Animal companions were included in the Companions update to offer you company while you wander across the galaxy. When the companion creature lays an egg, players have the opportunity to play God with the animal's children by bringing the egg to the Egg Sequencer.

What is the Egg Sequencer?

The Egg Sequencer, as well as various NPCs and shops, can be found in the Anomaly, the multiplayer centre. Players can use the Egg Sequencer to change four aspects of the offspring inside eggs that are ready to hatch, meaning they were laid by the partner creature at least 24 hours ago. These are the following:

Growth Hormone: Depending on the material entered into the sequencer, you can make the resulting companion creature larger or smaller. Putting salt, for example, will increase the creature's base size, whereas acid will lower it.

Gene Splitter: Possibly the most entertaining of the Egg Sequencer options, this lets you alter your companion's physical shape by adding more or fewer limbs, heads, or tails. The possibilities are practically endless, depending on the material you feed into the sequencer, but you won't know what you've made until it's too late, so it's a bit of a guessing game.

Dye Injector: Want to make your monster look like it belongs on your ship? You can do it right here. Each substance you inject into the egg will change the monster's colour, however, depending on the foundation creature you use, different elements will produce varied results. Carbon, for example, will just affect the creature's primary colour, whereas Condensed Carbon will change both the primary and secondary hues.

Neural Calibrator: Creating the ideal companion is more than just about appearances. You must also play with the creature's psyche. Changing the materials in the calibrator causes a creature's behaviour to move along one of three scales: gentleness/aggression, independence/devotion, and helpfulness/playfulness.

Simply place the egg you want to sequence in the Egg Sequencer's centre and choose a material for the many aspects you want to change. Before you turn on the sequencer, you must use at least one of them.

The Egg Sequencer is one of the clearest instances of No Man's Sky's emphasis on experimentation. Different materials will have varying degrees of impact on different creature species. A larger monster, for example, will require more material to change its hues, whereas a creature that is initially violent will require more material to become kind. This makes prescribing an exact list of ingredients required to achieve the desired result challenging.

The good news is that each successive generation of companions will move closer to the middle of that spectrum. It may take some time to find the exact buddy you desire, but that is part of the game's appeal. The Egg Sequencer will not tell you the outcome of the Dye Injector or Gene Splitter before you use them. It will tell you what changes you are making in the other two elements by saying things like "Size Increasing/Decreasing" or "Devotion Increasing/Decreasing."

What is Overdosing?

Up to a point, putting additional elements into the Egg Sequencer will result in a greater shift in the output. If you put too much of a single item into one of the slots, however, it will warn you that the egg within will overdose. This suggests that the mutation will produce something utterly random, with unexpected results. Putting a full stack of 999 of material into the slot usually causes this, but uncommon materials can accomplish it at lower levels. If you're looking for a specific look, it's not a good idea, but it might be a fascinating experiment to try.

Finally, each time you use the Egg Sequencer, you can only put one material into each aspect, but you can run the egg through the process as many times as you want before hatching it, so you can experiment as much as you want before releasing your genetically altered companion into the world.