Oh beans. I wrote a whole update andddd it's gone.
ANYWAY:
I'm at the point where I need to think about saving... and that means Resources! Resource-type objects are what I used for the inventory system, so I was already sort of familiar with it.
We can treat each catboy similarly to inventory items and make Resources (sorta... tiny little code-dictated forms) to manage them. We then only need to tell each instance which resource it needs to be. We can also use this to give them a primitive personality!
This is what the code looks like:

And when saved and loaded as a resource, it looks like this:

Snowprint here walks a little slow, sleeps in short bursts and jumps at an average frequency. We've also included a string to call a specific dialogic instance when right-clicked on, like here with Longnight:

Deffo need to tweak some colours. You can just about see the cats are all different colours as a placeholder now.
Finally, this also minimises code for altering relationship status, as we can just pull the name of the familiar and write their current status to the resource:

Bit grafted on, but it works.
I can clean up code a lot from here -- I've found out that the "with" command i'm used to in VBA doesn't seem to exist? so there's a lot of repeated bits of code. Surely there's an equivalent.
Next up: Saving! I hope.