Product Type files / attributes

I am looking for a way to add attributes to my products. The thing is, not in the way that is described from the tutorial FAQ. I want this to be just one thing assigned to each product.

To simplify, lets say I'm selling marbles. Each marble comes from a set. I want to be able to choose the option when setting up the product for "Red". There might be 5 red one in one set, twelve in another...

The whole point of this is to eventually change my filter results to "Red Marbles" "Blue Marbles"... and it will display all of the red ones from every set. I did see something on database schema. I hope I don't have to manually dig around mySQL database tables and edit. I don't know much about type varchar, collation etc. This thread
https://www.zen-cart.com/tutorials/index.php?article=114
didn't even really help me. I know its close, I just can't make sense of it. Any help to make this easy would be great.

Is this a tough issue to handle? I have tried to post it in a different area of this website and in other sites. No answer. Is my question confusing? Is it to easy to figure out? I do need the help please. Thanks.

The default filters don't work on attributes, so using them would not make it easy to do what you want. There might be a mod that gives improved search capabilities... if so, find out what factors it can search for. If you don't already use one of those, maybe you can customize and rename it to work on your characteristic.

I have found no mods that would work yet...
What about changing the attribute to the product? The attributes controller basically assigns options to products. When I set up my products can I add a field for "color"? Then I could work the search / filter around that attribute.

How can I go about this? thanks

There are threads about adding a field to a product, so that would be the place to look for that info. Adding that new field to searches would be another task, though - it will not be available automatically. Again, search the forum, as that topic has been discussed before too.