I'll skip to the chase. My problem is the circled content below in RPG Maker VX:



What I'm trying to do is create a village on the side of a mountain, so that as you travel further back, you go higher and higher. But you see, I'm having some trouble keeping the levels separate.

In the red you see that you can go from one level to the next in the bat of an eye, there's no way to stop the player from skipping the stairs and going up 80 feet in an instant..

In the blue, we have the other issue, that being that the cliff on a lower level is projecting its shadow onto the cliff on a higher level, which kills depth perception.

I dunno. I suppose I'm asking how to render a cliff-like setting? It was so much easier in earlier versions of RPG Maker. ><

You are just using the wrong tile. There is a cliff tile that you "should" be using. It's right above the wall tile.

That thought had occurred to me, yes. But I want my character to be able to walk on the next level. If I simply line the top of the cliff with the cliff tile above the wall tile, it doesn't look like a cliff so much as a large, oddly-shapped wall separating the two levels.

For the terrain blocking problem, you can try placing blank events at the edge of the cliff and setting them to be at the same level as the character. The only downside to this solution is if you have too many events (even blank ones) the game will start to get laggy.

The other thing you can do is use BulletXt's swap tileset script, which has a feature that lets you change the pathing settings for a specific map. Using this, you could temporarily modify your map chipsets, create a duplicate terrain tile for your cliff, and change the pathing setting for it to "Impassible" (X.) The downside to this is it's more time consuming and complicated.

You also might find it easier to put rocks and debris on the lower level, blocking passage to the higher level. Make use of the shift+left click when placing tiles so it doesn't seem like the high and low levels are connected.

For the shadowing problem, I've found BulletXt's Disable AutoShadow Plus to be very helpful.

-Bash

Sorry for the delay, I wasn't expecting a reply. Thank you for your help, I'll definitely look into those options.

Or, you can simply try this script.
Breadlord's Elevation Passability

That works too!