@beardalaxy You should minimize your use of plug-ins and other dependencies. Dependency hell is something you should avoid in software development, including game development. Code can conflict with each other and conflicting licenses can be a problem (meaning that you legally can't use a plug-in with another plug-in; this happens all the time in open-source development).

@beardalaxy Also what is so special about the "snowy trees" if you don't mind sharing? Are they animated? If so, you probably had each object having it's own animation timer and index when those can be shared static variables.

@xianc78 the plugin was one that would let me manually change the layer priority of tiles. normally, without doing the entirety of your maps manually (which is possible but more time consuming and would have taken me at least 4x as long), specific types of tiles are locked to specific sprite layers and there is no way to change them.

for these snowy mountain maps, i needed the tops of my trees to change to a different sprite layer, so i used this plugin. it was quite a while ago that i made this decision so i can't exactly remember what was going through my head, but the way i mapped everything actually turned out to not need the tops of the trees to be set to a different sprite layer after all.

my best guess is that i was thinking that i needed to have the trees go above this "shadow tile" that i use both to represent depth and cast shadows on top of other sprites (including the player) from things like second stories. the normal RPG Maker shadow tile doesn't affect much beyond the floor and walls so i had to make a custom one. since the shadow tile i made goes on top of the player, and the treetops also go on top of the player, i was probably thinking i needed a way to make sure the trees went on top of the shadow tile since the represented depth would be underneath them in some cases.

well, this turned out to not be true at all due to the way i actually mapped it out. it would have been if i was using VX or VX Ace, but since i'm using MV the layer system works a little bit differently. there is still a chance i actually needed this plugin somewhere else but it has been long enough that i don't remember putting it in, so i might just run into it in beta and have to find some fix for it then. i'm sure there are going to be a lot of things like that and it's just the nature of a solo dev working on something for so long with a lot of breaks and also improving along the way.

since it looks like i was only using it on these trees though, that hypothesis is probably the correct one. no idea why i thought that was the case. maybe it was while i was testing it out, but then when i actually mapped out things that changed. i haven't updated the engine or anything so it wouldn't be in that realm, but i could have sworn the maps ran fine right after i made them and that was on an older laptop so i wonder what the actual cause was or if i am just remembering incorrectly for some reason. maybe i thought it would work better on my PC but obviously didn't. the other plugins i added afterward don't seem to have any affect on the performance either.

still, i got it fixed so i'm not too worried about it.

@beardalaxy Do you know JavaScript at all along with RPG Maker's API? You can probably set the drawing priority manually that way by overriding RPG Maker's draw function (which I assume what these plug-ins are actually doing).