Concepts/Questions for Da Team:
1) How clunky would it be to animate certain tiles? I'm thinking for simple things like water/waterfalls, primarily, but hypothetically for occupied/in-use workshops too.
2) Same goes for Coordinate-Based Random Tiles as in #1. You could streamline the functionality to make "animated" tiles cycle through its 4 possible appearances once per frame, whereas static tiles would be assigned one of those based on their coordinates as a Random Seed.
It largely depends on the degree of animation that you want. If you wanted it animated in the same way as the buildings/creatures, then it would start to get expensive, fast (due to many more sprite configs being needed). A 'load a different tile each map load' style of animation (like buildings used to have) would probably be cheaper
4) Tile Shadows: A bit tricky, but Lit vs. Unlit tiles would be a nice thing to represent. It becomes tricky with the vertical facings, though, as they should draw their Lit/Unlitness from the square they face, or all vertical faces will be shadowed.
BatCountry was having a play with this earlier. One of the issues is that we don't load tiles into memory unless there's something on them, so they wind up not being available for neighbors to check for shadows.
I was experimenting with whether recycling the entire block volume might make keeping all the blocks reasonable, but it still hurts performance pretty bad.