Wow. I am clumsy. I used the wrong grid resolution in the previous Zora map, so there was an extra 2 columns of map area. I had to cut it out and do some editing. Here's the new map. (now with events)

Also - a synopsis of game events:

 - Speak to the Great Fairy and receive Fairy Dust.

 - Use Fairy Dust to remove the tree blocking Level-1.

 - Defeat the Giant Octorok and obtain a Heart Container.

 - Get bombs from the last room of Level-1.

 - Blast the blocks outside of Level-1 to gain entry to Knol Cemetery.

 - Play Hero's Etude on the Hero's Crest in front of the last tombstone to reveal a warp to Zora's Domain.

 - Defeat Clawgrip and obtain a Heart Container.

 - Get Flippers from the last room of Level-2.

 - Swim to the cave in Zora's Domain where Eulogy of Winds is procured.

 - Play Eulogy of Winds near Lake Tola to reach the entrance to Goro Valley.

 - Play Hero's Etude on Hero's Crest to reveal a warp to Goro Valley.

 - Defeat Gleeock and obtain a Heart Container.

 - Get the Giant's Ring from last room of Level-3.

 - Use the Giant's Ring to move the statue blocking the path to Mt. Goro Summit.

 - Play Hero's Etude on the Hero's Crest to reveal a warp to the Sea of Clouds.

 - Get the Switch-Hook from Level-4.

 - Defeat Eyesoar and obtain a Heart Container.

 - Procure the Dreamer's Ballad from the ruins outside of Level-4 by using the Switch-Hook to clear the pitfall.

 - Return to Labrus and play the Hero's Etude in front of Dark Castle Tola to open the gate blocking Level-5. (note that this crest will only respond if the player has all three songs)

 - Play the Dreamer's Ballad to prevent the armos from obstructing Link's path to Lazra.

 - Get the Firewheel Rod from Level-5.

 - Use the Firewheel Rod to clear the ice that obstructs Link's path.

 - Defeat Shadow Link and Lazra.

This just details all the primary obstructions that prevent Link from progressing beyond a certain point, and how the sequence is fulfilled.

Currently, the way I (or Iambian, rather) handle transparency in my games is similar to how NES reserves one channel for masking. In this case, dark gray is always the mask; so sprites only consist of black and white, and light gray. Any dark gray in the sprite is just something that outlines the areas that need to be read as transparent. No need to draw duplicate sprites for masking. It was also decided that avoiding dark grays helps sprites stand-out from their environment. The sprites would appear somewhat brighter than BG objects.

As I mentioned, I already looked into the transparent HUD idea, but didn't get good results. The only way to really distinguish the hearts from the BG is to draw a white outline; but then that makes the hearts appear really awkward in the case of grayscale. I would also have to make them substantially smaller to fit them within an 8x8 space. This is why I decided on the reserved space for the HUD in the first place.

I have to stick with the side-HUD, since maps are presently designed around it. Trying to work around the original HUD is just too difficult. I liked the idea as well, but I'm also not patient enough to painstakingly break the map tiles into 8x8 pieces and assemble 32x32 objects from them.

Some areas, such as Zora's Domain, are going to be a little more spacey, given the lack of holy-crap-so-many-random-objects having to be present in a 6x6 map grid. The tileset is more dedicated here, and areas are more straightforward.

I've enclosed the first-half of Zora's Domain to show some progress. The other two overworlds will benefit from some additional roominess, as well, since they'll have fairly dedicated tilesets.

Just mock-ups, currently. I'm not going to throw the tiles into a map editor until I decide how to go about representing certain events and objects. (e.g., movable blocks) Since there's so much to interact with, it's hard to represent this in editors like CalcGS. In the meantime, an image can at least represent where all these events and objects are located.

New mock-up. Working on ideas for how large bosses are going to appear within a single screen.

So, uh... townspeople are going to have some tiny housing.

I can make some houses two-screens long, but this is going to be your one-room, average home.

I'll be sure to post the completed tileset and spriteset. Maybe they can be re-used for other games.

On another note: I'm debating on how to handle something...

Basically, I want to use a 16x16 grid for the tileset. Since I have that 8 px high HUD at the bottom, this offsets the whole map grid by 8 px. 16x16 tiles won't evenly fit to each screen. I could implement the map tiles as 8x8, but that would be really tedious on me. (imagine putting together trees, and other large objects, 8 px at a time!)

One way I can sidestep this problem is by moving the HUD to the side of the screen - that is, a 16 x 64 display. I could fit some additional items to it, but it would be on the side. I worry it might seem awkward.

100,000 cycles is accurate. That's the most common estimation.

Solid-state disks usually employ write-wearing to make sure data is evenly distributed across the disk, and prolong its overall lifespan. I'm not sure if this is necessarily true of memory cards and FlashDrives, but it could be. That said, I do think Flash memory is really stable as compared to some other storage. HDs with moving parts are much more likely to fail. I think this is especially true USB hard drives.

I'm not sure how many times optical mediums can be rewritten. I imagine much less, since they're mostly intended for "write once, ready many" storage. I never bother to rewrite discs, or add new data at a later time. I just burn it all at once and close the session. I'm too worried adding or editing data will corrupt some sectors and cause a cyclic data redundancy error upon trying to read it again. Then again, I'm paranoid when it comes to backing-up my data.