This page details how to adopt a pet companion in No Man’s Sky. Includes how to craft Creature Pellets, how to bond with your pet companion, customize their appearance, summon and ride them.

How to Craft Creature Pellets and Use the Companion Register¶

Where to Find Carbon¶

The first thing you’ll need to do before you can adopt a pet companion is craft Creature Pellets. These are the standard food for all alien species that you can adopt, and they will happily munch away on them whenever you offer some. All you need to craft the pellets is Carbon, but you’ll need quite a lot of it, since one pellet costs 60 Carbon to craft. You should always have easy access to a source of Carbon, with most flora providing a considerable amount when mined. Alternatively, you can often find it available to purchase from the Galactic Trade Terminal or from visiting pilots.

Other Uses for Creature Pellets¶

It’s a good idea to keep about 10 Creature Pellets in your inventory before you set out to adopt a pet companion, as some species will require more pellets before they become neutral, allowing you to tame them. Note that the pellets can also be used to calm angry creatures if you drop them on the ground in front of the creature, and they will also allow you to farm animals in specific ways (such as milking or obtaining eggs), even if you don’t want to adopt them. Finally, if you’re in need of it, dropping the pellets on the floor will cause animals to produce Faecium upon eating it.

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(1 of 3) You’ll need 60 Carbon to craft 1 Creature Pellet.

How to Adopt and Bond With Your Pet Companion¶

Find a Suitable Species¶

Once you have a decent amount of Creature Pellets, it’s time to find a suitable pet companion to adopt. You can try this first with any viable species on the planet you find yourself on. To identify a viable animal for adoption, all you need to do is approach them to check whether you have the option to feed them the pellets. If you do, you can adopt them. If not, the species is unfortunately not suitable for adoption. Most of the species that you can adopt are mammalian or similar in appearance to large dinosaurs.

Adopt and Bond With Your Companion¶

After finding a suitable animal for adoption and feeding it for the first time, you’ll often need to feed it again, at least one more time, before you can interact with it and adopt it. At this point you’ll want to immediately give your new companion attention by petting it, which will increase its happiness. You can also feed it some more pellets to alleviate any hunger. Both of these actions will need to be repeated fairly regularly to ensure that your companion is well fed and happy, and therefore willing to follow you. If you severely neglect your companion, they may abandon you.

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(1 of 4) You can access the Companion Register from the Creatures tab of the quick access menu.

Managing Your Companions¶

If you have a limited number of available companion slots but you still want to adopt new pets, you can choose to abandon your pet from the Companion Register menu. There are no negative consequences to this, but you’ll have to start from scratch by spending a considerable amount of time bonding with your new companion. You can command your pet to stay, go to a specific location, or follow you from the Creatures menu, and you can also summon or dismiss them from here too. If you’re off the surface of a planet (such as in the Anomaly, a space station or freighter), a hologram of the companion will be summoned instead.

If your companion has a high percentage of helpfulness, they will be more likely to do what you ask of them. This will also influence how likely they are to perform specific tasks for you, such as mining resources or bringing you valuable items (more on that below). You can actually point to specific resources once you have a mining laser accessory for your pet, and it will sometimes begin to mine them for you within a few seconds, so long as they have a decent helpfulness stat.

Create a New Companion With the Egg Sequencer¶

You will find that most pet companions have the ability to lay eggs, but only when they’re well fed. There will be a timer indicated for gestation period, which is usually 24 hours. At this point you can induce the egg and collect it. If it’s marked as a Viable Egg, it will hatch within 24 hours as a descendent of your current pet.

However, if you want to further customize the appearance and traits of this new companion, you can take it to the Egg Sequencer on board the Anomaly. Here you can adjust Growth Hormones, Gene Splitters, Dye Injectors, and Neural Calibrators to produce a desired outcome. All of these elements require specific materials (and quantities) to produce a particular outcome, which will often be indicated once you place a material in the slot, as shown in the screenshot below. If you use more of a material which produces a desired outcome, it will increase the effectiveness of it. In this way, you can produce companions with high percentages of helpfulness or playfulness, adjust their size and colour, and even the anatomical structure of the creature. So long as you keep your companions happy and well fed, you will have plenty of opportunities to experiment.

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(1 of 3) You can induce an egg once it appears as an option in the interaction menu. A gestation period may be present before you can induce the egg.

Customize and Utilize Your Companions¶

Once you’ve found a pet companion (or two or three or four…) that you know you want to keep, you can customize their appearance to some extent. This doesn’t involve changing the colour of skin or fur, but rather adding accessories to the left and right flank. These range from things like armor, vitals monitors, bio canisters, torches, energy coils and rounded lasers. Most of these are for cosmetic purposes only, but your companion can actually help you to gather resources if you equip it with a mining laser. Unfortunately, you don’t have much control over what resources your companion will gather, but it will sometimes approach you with valuable items, or sometimes not so valuable items, so long as you have it following you around.

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(1 of 3) If you want a companion who will help you gather resources, look for one with the Helpfulness trait. You can improve the percentage over time by interacting with the animal and spending time with it.