Construction Boogaloo

[Mordent]

Still though, what's the difference between the admin swap tile tool (which i've seen done PLENTY of times in action) and something in-game, which can be restricted by being resource intensive?

Depends on how the latter is implemented. If it's done as overlays, every individual customized tile has its own overlay. This is bad. When admins swap tiles, they're making them all the same /turf object or changing their sprite to the same thing (i.e. all pointing at the same thing). That is better than each turf saying "hi, I look exactly like that tile over there but I'm special and need my own sprite, here it is".

This is why my suggestion involved some interface to select from existing sprites; we then simply change the icon_state var of the relevant turf to the right one.