Avoiding "mesh leak" when setting the UV of my mesh in edit mode

[whole vessel]

So I'm making a little tilemap system which consists in a mesh renderer + script that allows me to define which part of the map texture (seen in the material at the bottom-right corner) it will render. Everything works but I'm constantly getting this in the log: "Instantiating mesh due to calling MeshFilter.mesh during edit mode. This will leak meshes. Please use MeshFilter.sharedMesh instead.". If I use sharedMesh, whenever I set the tilePosition for one, it changes for every tile too. Is there a safe way to deal with "instance UVs"? The system is meant to be quite simple, 1 quad per tile and 1 material w/ 1 big texture, I just go and tell which part of the texture I want to render in a specific tile.

Code is as simple as:

private void OnValidate()
{
    var uv = new Vector2[]
    {
        new Vector2(0, 0),
        new Vector2(1, 0),
        new Vector2(0, 1),
        new Vector2(1, 1),
    };

    var tex = GetComponent<MeshRenderer>().sharedMaterial.GetTexture("_MainTex");

    if (tex == null)
    {
        Debug.Log("no tex");
        return;
    }

    var texSize = new Vector2(tex.width, tex.height);
    var uvScale = tileSize / texSize;
    var uvOffset = tilePosition * tileSize / texSize;


    GetComponent<MeshFilter>().mesh.uv = uv
        .Select(v => (v + uvOffset / uvScale) * uvScale)
        .ToArray();
}

[autumn crane]

This just tells you that a new instance of the mesh would be created. Doing that at edit time would just keep the new mesh in the memory. The editor considers this meaningless. If you want to persist it, then you should create a new mesh explicitly(and assign to whatever mesh filter you want) instead. If it's meant for runtime only, then don't do it outside the play mode.

And yes, if you want separate uv data per tile, you'll end up with a quad mesh per tile, while originally each tile references the same mesh. So it's probably not the best approach if you plan to have a lot of tiles.

[whole vessel]

I intend to use it in the editor so I can make my map, yes

It seems like I can make a big texture for the chunk and SetPixels myself based on map texture, don't know the feasibility of that when it comes to performance so I'll keep researching

Apparently I can also (that one at 1st glance seems ideal) define different vertices for each tile and map their UVs separately

[whole vessel]

Turned out to be much simpler than I though lmaooo

Just had to add more vertices so I can map UVs to each tile

Found out after watching a 4 hours of a 12y old tutorial on youtube but worth it 😄