Hi folks! First time poster here. I'm getting my head around p8 for the first time, and exploring lots of carts to learn more. One common thing I see in many carts is odd, dotted patterns buried deep in the sprite sets. Are these lookups for pallette swaps, or some other wizarding technique I'm unaware of?

The last two tabs of sprites and the lower half of the map both share the same space in memory. So if you have lots of sprites, you'll see weird stuff in the lower half of the map, and if you have a big map, you'll see weird stuff in the last two tabs of sprites. It's just one of the constraints built into PICO-8. Hope that helps! :)

Aha! I'd read that elsewhere, but it didn't sink in that this would be the result. I've evidently forgotten my 6502 days. Thanks so much!

In addition to the shared map/sprite memory, some carts use the space to store data for other uses. Each sprite holds 64 values from 0-15, and sget() can be used to reference those values. Using this approach for data storage can save a lot of tokens.

Yeah, that was my first assumption.