SOLVED.
Went through a couple tutorials and finally ended back up on 12 days of NESmas. The problem was VARIABLE TILES. Those things are temperamental. Had to do with matching up the variable tile names in settings to the ones in hud elements. Not only that but capitalization matters and my dyslexic brain not realizing that the first letter wasn’t capitalized. Anyway. There was a lot to it but I guess the real answer, as always, is watch the tutorials. More importantly the tutorials for your version.