on every other layer you can stack tiles with no problem but not A. is this because of there being multiple layers? and if so how can I fix or at least mitigate it?
The tag says MV so I’ll answer for MV first and then say what changed in MZ.
A tiles are ground tiles. The editor treats anything from the A tabs as the floor of the map and it assumes the floor is opaque. So painting a second A tile doesn’t stack it on the first one. It replaces it. B through E tiles never do this because the editor doesn’t class them as ground and puts them on the upper planes where they stack freely. That’s the whole difference you’re seeing.
In MV there’s no layer selector to turn off. Automatic layering is the only mode that editor has. So there are two real ways around it.
The first is to move the art you want to stack into a B through E slot. Copy the piece out of your A sheet into a spare space on a B or C sheet and import it again. The pixels are identical. The only thing that changed is which tab the editor reads it from and that tab is what decides the behaviour.
One caveat on that trick and it depends which A tab you took it from. A5 tiles are plain single tiles so they move across cleanly. A1 through A4 are autotiles and they lose their automatic edge blending once they become a B through E tile. If the thing you’re stacking is a cliff or a water edge you’ll feel that loss. If it’s a plain floor variant you won’t.
The second way is parallax mapping. You build the map as one image in your art program and leave the map underneath nearly empty. That’s the usual answer when the overlap you want is complicated and it’s a large part of why so many MV projects end up there.
If you ever move the project to MZ the toolbar gets a layer selector. You switch it off Auto and place the second A tile on layer 2 by hand. That one control is the fix and MV simply doesn’t have it.
Two things worth knowing in both engines.
Whether a tile draws in front of the player or behind isn’t decided by which layer it sits on. It’s a priority flag stored per tile in the tileset. I checked this in the MZ corescripts and the draw step reads that flag for the tile id rather than looking at the layer index. So promoting a tile to a higher layer won’t put it in front of the player and editing the tileset priority will.
Autotile edge detection only looks at neighbours on the same plane. Two A tiles that need to blend into each other have to share one layer.
What are you trying to stack? If it’s cliffs or a shoreline where the autotile blending matters, that would be different then just a plain floor variant.
An additional option could be using events as an extra layer. Drop an event where you want the overlap, set its graphic to the tile you want on top, set Priority to Below Characters, and leave the contents empty. It draws over whatever’s under it and never touches the map layers. Lighter than parallax mapping if you only need this in a handful of spots.
The only real issue with it is the event image picker only offers the B through E pages, not the A ones, so it pairs with copying the art into a spare B or C slot like CSAF mentioned.
thank you for the help CSAF, that will likely work well. i’ll probably use the first option and just make sure to have tile sets ready.
Also worth noting that MV reserves layer 2 for A1/A2 overlay tiles (eg deep water, lilypads, forest), so there are only 2 layers available for B-E tiles. In MZ you can use all 3 layers for B-E (not sure if auto mode does that though).