How do you get a pet with a copy of a deviant color gene? I know you can only get a pet with the gene expressed by breeding, but how do the genes come into the gene pool?

You breed pets with similar colours together till you get a baby with double colour and pattern genes, then you breed that baby with an identical pet to (hopefully) get a deviant.

Hope this helps :)

I understand that you have to breed pets until you get one that's homozygous in order to have a deviant, but how do you get the gold starred alleles in the first place? Or is that through breeding homozygous animals?

I'm sorry if I'm misunderstanding you.

The gold stars don't represent a special allele. They can appear randomly when you breed a homozygous animal, and only serve to designate which trait in the pet has deviance. You won't find those stars in the genetics of any non-deviant pet.

That makes sense. Thank you!