Custom Color Palettes: Give Your Codex Pet Its Own Colors

What a custom palette decides before anything is drawn

A custom palette is the set of colors you choose before the generator starts, and for a codex pet it shapes the result more than the photo does. The photo supplies the silhouette. The palette supplies every pixel inside it. Pick the wrong palette and even a clean generation comes back looking like somebody else's pet.

Order matters. Colors are applied while the frames are drawn, not afterwards, so there is no tint slider waiting at the end. The generator commits to one palette for all nine states at once.

What the Unlimited plan adds to the palette

On the free tier and on Pro, the palette comes from your photo. That works until it doesn't: one warm lamp, one auto white balance that drifted, and the grey cat you photographed arrives in the spritesheet as orange.

The Unlimited plan hands the palette back to you. You set the colors, they carry through every state, and the photo goes back to doing the one job it is good at.

I did not expect to care about this feature. Then I tried to match a pet to a desktop wallpaper, took six photos, and none of them produced the color I wanted. Pasting a hex value took four seconds.

• Starter and Pro: palette is derived from the uploaded photo, no manual input
• Unlimited: palette is yours to set, by hex value or picker
• Every tier: the same colors run through all nine animation states
• Every tier: changing colors means regenerating, not recoloring

The four color slots and what each one controls

Four slots do almost all of the visible work. Set them in this order, because the later ones only make sense once the earlier ones are settled.

• Body: the mid tone that reads as fur, feathers or skin. Set it first, it covers the most pixels
• Shadow: one step darker than the body. Go two steps and the pet looks dirty rather than shaded
• Outline: usually near black, but a dark version of the body color keeps small pets from looking like clip art
• Accent: collars, eyes and small details. This is where contrast comes from, so it should be the most saturated color in the set

Keeping personalized pet colors consistent

Write your colors down. A year from now you will want a second pet that matches the first, and something like a dusty blue will not get you back there. Put the hex values in a plain text file inside the pets folder where you will trip over them.

Check the pet against the background it will actually sit on. A mid grey body vanishes against grey editor chrome, which is the single most common complaint I hear after install.

• Save the hex list next to the pet folders, not in your head
• Preview against your real desktop background, not the plain preview canvas
• Avoid pure white and pure black in any slot, both clip at the edges
• Keep the accent saturated and everything else quiet

When the colors come out wrong

A short list of failures accounts for nearly every complaint about pet colors, and almost none of them are the generator being random.

• Everything looks muddy: the shadow is too close to the body, push them further apart
• The pet looks flat: there is no accent color separating features from the body
• Fine in preview, wrong after install: your desktop background sits closer to the body color than you thought
• One frame looks off but the rest are fine: that is animation timing, not the palette, see /blog/codex-pet-9-animation-states
• You changed the palette and nothing moved: you edited pet.json, which holds no colors. Regenerate instead

Start with the body color

Pick a body color, let the other three follow from it, and spend one extra minute before you generate. Custom colors are the part of a pet you look at every day for months, which makes them the cheapest upgrade available.

Head to / to generate a pet with a palette of your own, read /blog/codex-pet-color-customization if you would rather repaint the spritesheet by hand, and see /pricing for what the Unlimited plan includes.