I'm working on something I've been pulling aspects of from others (mainly Chilali) and I've come across the neatest discoveries.

I've come to the decision that I cannot advance coats without having every coat from each species in the line that I am working on. So for instance, I have Painted and Jub in the Nile species and Koi, Emp & Kabuki, for Masked but I haven't been able to progress farther than that.

I started on a spreadsheet to go through and find out exactly what coats each of my roos has in it's line. I've had three nests from the Kois Sdeez and Emelie gave me (a jub, and two kois) and I pulled in a roo that my partner was going to release (a jub with st, sue, zulu, kabuki, azure, notched & curled just in the first 4 generations back) to pair up with Sdeez's roo (a notched, with st, sue, jub, azure & zulu background) and switch things up a bit to hopefully pull out the Notched ear and any other trait that wants to follow.

Going back through just those three roos so far, they are insanely related. Like generations upon generations of inbreeding related which is so crazy since I got the three roos from three separate sources. Sdeez's roo however somehow got as far as it did without a single Highland inter-mixed in there.

None of the three have loch or snowpaw in them so I "borrowed" an OS of the roo I got from my partner and matched it up with a nest that had loch, highland, cinder, caledonian and snowpaw in it so I can backbreed their offspring with the original line stemming from Sdeez's koi that I am planning on making my main line to work with for coats and traits. I am hoping that filling that small little void of highland, loch and snowpaw will bump me up to that next level that I am trying to achieve.

Someone said recently (may have been Chi, not sure though) that they have stopped looking at their roos external genetics and only see them as a whole with all of the genetics combined and I completely see that now. I am working with Sierras, Fawns, Ursine and such and all I can see is Azure, Sakura, Western Desert and Dune because I know that is the direction they are headed.

Really, I just want to give a big ol' thank you to everyone here in this forum that has been patient with me and my crazy noob questions and helped to breathe life back into what I am working on. Even if my theories are incorrect, I actually feel like I have a foothold on what I'm doing now and that means a lot. <3_<3

So thank you everyone!