This is 100% me too. I’ve been shipping silly quantities of materials over because I just can’t bring myself to like how it looks. It doesn’t compliment or contrast any other materials that I’d want to use. Way too dark; just doesn’t look nice or suit the oni aesthetic, which all the others do. Seconded for the mod author to change this! The colour of the ore before mining it looks nice.

For those wanting to change the color of Cobalt Ore (known as "Cobaltite" in the game code) and refined Cobalt (just "Cobalt"), or any other material color for that matter, this is pretty easily doable with a config file tweak.

TL;DR: Just edit "C:\Users\<username>\Documents\Klei\OxygenNotIncluded\mods\Steam\1739635014\Config\ElementColors.json". You need to add sections for "Cobaltite" and "Cobalt".

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Amazingly, this config file can be edited while the game is running and it will take effect immediately. That actually makes me suspicious that this mod may be impacting performance by reading its configs so often... But maybe that's just how the mod framework functions; I'm not a modder. Anyway...

1) Browse to the mod's config directory. On my Windows/Steam install, it is located at "C:\Users\<username>\Documents\Klei\OxygenNotIncluded\mods\Steam\1739635014\Config".

2) Make a backup copy of "ElementColors.json" and keep it somewhere safe.

3) Open the original file with a text editor. Annoyingly the whitespacing and indentation is all messed up by default. This is not a problem, but it makes it harder to read and edit, so I went through and made it consistent using tab characters instead of the mess of spaces and tabs that it was.

4) If you're not familiar with the JSON data structure format, study it for a moment to understand how each material is represented as an object, and the whole file is an array of these objects, separated by commas. Also notice that cobalt is missing entirely (as well as some other materials).

5) Add a new object for both "Cobaltite" and "Cobalt" and configure the RGB values as desired. I used the following values, which represent colors roughly similar to the colors of their respective icons in game. (I can't use nice indentation in this comment.)

"Cobaltite": {
"Red": 0,
"Green": 1,
"Blue": 1,
"DarkMode": true
},
"Cobalt": {
"Red": 0,
"Green": 0.4,
"Blue": 0.6
},

From what I gleaned in my minimal testing, the default color scale for any given RGB value uses 0 to mean a midtone brightness and 1 to mean a full brightness. Adding the `"DarkMode": true` property appears to change that range for all colors such that 0 is fully dark and 1 is midtone. As a result it's probably not possible to achieve every possible tint color, since you can't simultaneously specify, for example, a very dark red and a very bright blue. Also remember that you're working with tints on an existing asset, and not with absolute colors.

It probably doesn't matter what order the objects are in, but I put "Cobalt" at the end of the "//Refined Metal" section and "Cobaltite" at the end of the "//Metal Ore" section.

6) Make sure your JSON formatting is correct and save the file with your changes. I make no claims about what might happen if you save the file with incorrect formatting. If you have the game open and are looking at something made of these materials, you will see the change immediately upon saving the file.

7) Enjoy building everything out of your beautiful Cobalt.

P.S. To find the in-game name of any given material, you can search for the material on oni-db.com, and the in-game name will be in the URL, e.g.: https://oni-db.com/details/cobaltite. As far as I can tell, capitalization probably doesn't matter, but in my config file I stuck with the convention used by the mod author.

You're a great guy

Can confirm the solution by [GA] Roachy makes it much better.

If you want to edit the colors using sliders rather than fiddling with numbers, you can use photoshop.

Import the color you want to adjust using a screenshot of the object into a new layer.

Create a new Color Balance layer and Ignore the Midtone tab. The Shadow and Highlight tabs are the ones you should mess with. Shadow tab is when DarkMode = True. Also, you can only use positive numbers so RGB, no CMY.

It gets the color close but the brightness is off (Dark is too dark, light is too light)) so you still need to fine tune in game. Make sure to backup your custom configs elsewhere, otherwise when you verify files or update the mod it might overwrite.

very helpful

Hopefully it looks better without tweaks since version 5.1 of the mod.