Now that, after countless modifications, reallocations and additions, the design of the charset is almost finished (only 1 black, 3 brown, 1 pink and 2 middle grey characters remain to be defined), I could allocate some more characters to improve this machinery here.

Also, the map design has progressed quite nicely. I'd say that the zone is 30% done now.

One thing that kind of bothers me is that there some byproduct characters (i.e. characters with a background color different from the one that they were designed for) that really look promising and ask to be used for something, but I still haven't figured out how/where (but this is rather normal, given that, being the charset so new and constantly changing, I'm not fully accustomed to it yet).
Anyway, soon I'll take a break from graphics and map to finish the music: I need to know the final size of the music, as that will determine how much RAM remains for the map and its associated effects. That break will allow me to return to the chartset with fresh eyes.