Creatures Caves

When I recently got back into Creatures, I found myself growing rather unpleasant towards grendels, who seemed insistent on turbo-slapping my baby norns into the afterlife. But then I realised, I don't need to hate grendels, I need to understand them, and their inability to be co-habitated with norns, ettins, literally anything else, and sometimes each other.
And so, I downloaded a few unofficial grendel breeds, set down a male and female of each breed into my world, and watched everything fall apart in real time. Naturally, a bunch of them didn't make the cut of 'staying alive', but the ones that did bred with each other and made mostly really weird looking lumpy multicoloured Frankenstein's grendels.
However, a diamond emerged from the rough. Or rather, a pearl.

These funky reptiles are what I assume to be a mix of Dustdevil grendels, Lavender grendels, and Darwin grendels. Some pigment bleed genes have resulted in a small population of grendels with a very pretty, almost pearl-like appearance. They stole my heart, and I set on breeding them to improve them further.
Then something went wrong with the save file and now whenever I try to open it I get a memory error and half of the metarooms disappear. Oh well.

But that brings me to my current project. Rather than breeding together other people’s hard work in a manner that would get me in trouble with animal welfare groups if I did it in real life, I’ve started working on the definitely over-ambitious project of creating a breed from scratch. Inspired by my shiny little grendels now stuck in digital purgatory, and the amazing work of Ghosthande for her Dustdevil grendels, I’m striving to make a breed of grendel that is pastel, iridescent, and overall quite aesthetically pleasing.
Right now I’ve modelled most of its bits (Missing the hair and some shape keys for the mouth and ears) and I plan on pre-rendering them into sprites. I have a fairly decent grasp on how the sprite making process goes, though I am not yet entirely sure of it.

The materials are entirely procedural by the way, relying on vertex paint weights for the faded parts of the coat. I’ve also tested to make sure it’ll look decent when scaled down, but I don’t know if Creatures 3’s colour palette (Ha ha old software) will affect it.

While I am somewhat confident that I could go about learning the genetic and technical aspects of creating the breed on my own, I would be glad to take any help or advice from the community. Right now I’m not even sure exactly what sort of genetic attributes this breed should have. I’d like the pearlescent grendels to be somewhat docile, if that’s not already an overdone concept, and susceptible to pigment bleed mutations if that is possible to do. Maybe they’d be harder to breed, and have a longer or shorter lifespan than jungle grendels?
We’ll see.
http://imagehost.eu/Kqyf.png
This was the original sketch, for what it’s worth.