Even though I’d really like to deprecate and eventually remove them, currently Tiled still supports embedded tilesets. Many people still use them and there are probably people who prefer this approach, especially if they don’t use any of the meta-information you may associate with a tileset or its tiles anyway.
People can still embed tilesets in two ways:
- Check the “Embed in map” box when creating a new tileset when the current file is a map.
- Pressing the “Embed Tileset” button below the Tilesets view.
It looks like things will stay this way also for Tiled 1.2, but for 1.3 I’d like to add support for projects, in which case I’d prefer to no longer have to deal with embedded tilesets. Hopefully it will be the right time, because the project support should make dealing with separate assets easier (whereas embedded tilesets would be kind of “hidden”).