Hey everyone, sorry for taking forever to reply.
What DiscoScience is doing is really not supported in a straightforward way by Factorio's modding API. I would love to just set the colour of each lab, or replace their animations, but at the moment the only way I was able to get the effect I wanted was to track all the labs, and to overlay extra graphics onto each one every frame. Unfortunately, this means that the cost scales linearly with a small but non-negligible constant factor.
The mod runs a lot better than it did when I first made it, but at the moment I don't think there's much more I can do to improve performance. I'd love to be proven wrong, but someone with better knowledge of the engine and API would have to take a look at it.
