In the process of painting this landscape, I learned I made the terrain ridiculously high res. I didn’t know that I had done that until I went to create my terrain material and assign layer info for the paintable layers. I kept receiving an error for running out of video memory. Searching many forums, I was directed to a possible solution of increasing my page file size (still fuzzy on what that is exactly, but I know I probably shouldn’t be messing with it) and these results just seemed…wrong. I tried many times to assign this material with it crashing every time. Eventually that caught up with me and ruined my project. Thankfully I had made a back up, so not too much progress had been lost. I went in much more carefully this time and assigned the most basic terrain material I could, which is where I learned that it was incredibly high res. I was able to fix this in the terrain customize tool and now have a manageable terrain, though still very large and laggy.
These are most definitely not the final materials, but it is something that I have managed to get working in a short timeframe.
Next time: make sure I have plenty of back ups, fixed terrain materials, and grass