just posting this for posterity because eventually I'll have everything sorted and it will look a lot better, I hope anyway. still working through the script which is more important right now.

I've never used tilesets directly in any rpgm project I've worked on, always layered parallax images, either drawn or precomposed tilesets outside of rpgm. I thought maybe working in program would save me time but I find myself fighting to do very basic things I'd have solved immediately using parallaxes so I don't know.