Agreed. You and I have gotten as far as we can on the gas we had lol. Hopefully it is because of the map size and stuff. I am only changing tiles from one to another and not adding any more from now forward, so if it is that then at least it won’t get bigger haha.
Thanks again for your time and help. Appreciate it 
Could you save the layer (Ocean) as a separate scene, maybe binary scene (scn, not tscn)? Right click on the (Ocean) layer node and “Save Branch as Scene”.
k so I did that and the new .scn is 993 B.
since that was progress…i then added all the other nodes from the previous save’s tree (colorRect, textureRect, etc.) so that the new .scn was the same essentially as the previous one.
The new file size after doing all that (so I’m basically where I was before ur suggestion) is now 993 B STILL.
So…I guess that fixed it? I can’t say I understand the “why” but at least I have a “how” I can try in the future if it happens again.
I don’t have enough understanding of the different file formats to have ANY clue why that seems to have worked.
Your main tscn should only be a central file with all the links to data heavy resources. You want your tscn in the low kB range. Did you saved the ocean as a scn or as a tscn?
Every time you store files as text (tres, tscn etc.) Godot has to parse these text on loading. If it’s binary (res, scn) it can be direct injected into the scene tree. Parsing large text is always bad/expensive.
The loading of the tscn in the editor should be a little bit (a lot) faster now.
So just in case it is important, I will note that this isn’t meant to be my main .tscn. It is just the only one I’ve made so far. It is intended to be a world map for the game I’m working on bit by bit in between tutorial series and such as I learn. Another scene will eventually become the main scene, but I don’t have any other scenes started yet as I just began it today as something to do for a break from all the tutorials and lessons. Not sure if that matters, but wanted to put it here just in case.
To answer your comment tho, I saved the ocean scene as a .scn as u told me to. It seemed to have converted the ocean layer in the original .tscn into an imported scene as when I did a couple other things it broke (I fixed that tho so no worries there, but ya…the tscn becomes dependant on the existence of the .scn if i export the layer to its own .scn.
Would you say that i should be avoiding EVER using any .t*** file type then and only always save everything as its NON-t version…only use .res instead of .tres, and only ever save scenes as .scn instead of .tscn as I’m working? And if that is a yes, what is the purpose of the .t— file types at all then if they are problematic?
What an adventure today has turned out to be lmao.
You want tres and tscn if you want your files human readable (in a text editor), and to have diffs in a version control. But for all data heavy files, I would store them as binary. 1024x1024 tiles is data heavy, there you have to start to optimize. As I have stated, I’m not that firm with 2D tile maps. Not sure what would be the best way to handle them in such size. Storing them in a scn instead of a tscn looks like a good first step to me.
I think I get what you’re saying. I also found this and read it and have a better understanding of what ur driving at I think from that complementing what you’ve taught me today:
If I’m understanding it all correctly then I think what I will do is continue to use .tscn for now, and if the save/load time gets problematic then I’ll switch then, and if not then I’ll wait so that version control remains manageable. Then when things are finalized down the production line, I can resave everything into the binary forms before the final compile so that loading times and such are minimal. I hear version control is important so I should probably prioritize keeping that as smooth as possible until I can’t avoid it any further.
But I want to thank you truly for all the help you gave. Even after saying you had helped as much as you could you still were working on it to find an idea and then you did, and on top of all that I learned something very useful long-term that I would never have otherwise known to teach myself. So, I really do appreciate it. I’m going to mark your message as the solution I think, and we can call it a day and get a glass of our choice of delicious beverage.