Also I was curious if there was a way to slightly decrease the size of the tileset to work on a 1280 x 1024 resolution...My monitor decided to die and I was forced to downgrade. I assumed (and am likely wrong in every way) I could just like...resize the whole thing with a photo editing software then alter the proper files to accommodate the new size? I suppose I could just play and deal with some of my screen cut off since its only like a 12% difference in size or something (18x18 to 16x16)
If you really want to resize the tileset for your monitor I wrote an Octave script to do that a while ago.
It is called
Tileset Resizer, the readme for it also includes instructions on what files need to be edited if you do decide to change the size of the tileset to make it display correctly.
You should know that due to the hardcoded 80 minimum displayed horizontal tiles that on a monitor with a 1280 pixel horizontal resolution Dwarf Fortress will automatically resize the tiles to 16x16 to meet this limit anyway.
I gave a more detailed explanation about the implications of the 80 tile limit
here if anyone is interested in it.
Because you want to decrease tile size you can get decent results by setting
[TEXTURE_PARAM:NEAREST]
in init.txt instead of
[TEXTURE_PARAM:LINEAR]
This will make Dwarf Fortress use nearest neighbor interpolation instead of linear interpolation to resize the tileset (when zooming or using a tileset too large for you monitor).
Because tilesets have a low resolution NEAREST should look better than LINEAR when decreasing size.
Edit:
I put up a comparison of the results you can get from the Tileset Resizer function intended for downsizing tilesets (resize_tileset_tilebytile) comparing the different interpolation methods available in Octave for final tile sizes ranging from 24x24 to 10x10.It is very large (10.4 MB) so you will need to click on the Download Image button to see the fullsize image.
That should help you decide if it you want to spend the time to resize the tileset yourself or not.