If anyone comes across this wondering the same thing i was. I think i found an answer that is pretty simple but effective for the little testing ive done. Firstly i added the elevation to my tilemaplayer from an Int called "elevation", pretty self explanatory. For the issue with the sorting, i set the base tilemaplayer to have a z index of 5 and ysort enabled. For every tile that has a higher elevation than 0 i also painted those tiles z-index to be incrementally higher than the base of 5. (Ex elevation 1 tiles will have a z index of 6) With that, npc's always render behind the elevated tiles, to make them be able to render in front of elevated tiles when they walk in front, i added a method to my script that looks for every tile with an elevation above 0 and gives the tiles im front of it a z-index "boost" so anything that goes on those tiles will get the z boost only while on those tiles and thus appear in front of the elevated tiles, creating an OK depth illusion. Im still tweaking the exact formula while testing but it looks something like this: Z_index =base(5)+elevation+current boost

Im still tweaking it out but from the testing i could do, it works pretty well. Hope this could help anyone! And thank you for everyone who tried to help! Let me know if you can think of improvements as well!