mbtiles

There's also mbtiles, which is a standard way of storing map tiles in an sqlite database in blob fields.

MBtiles files are SQLite database files, so you need a SQLite process running somewhere to extract the requested tiles.

It supports downloading regions that are listed on Geofabrik [2] and converting them to mbtiles or pmtiles.

An mbtiles file is just an SQLite db which can store image or vector tiles which can be very useful.

If you're deploying PMTiles somewhere that doesn't support byte offset requests, then they don't really have much advantage over mbtiles.

Instead of the SQLite based mbtiles format they developed their own container format (and a converter).

But they also say they disliked mbtiles due to its SQLite dependency, and that the versatiles format is inspired on/based on pmtiles.

Did the LLM suggest using some pre-existing standard like MBTiles for the tiles?

It sounds like they created their own format here (contrast vs mbtiles, pmtiles).

It's a resource-efficient and easy to setup project to generate mbtiles or pmtiles from OSM pbf files, which are free to download from Geofabrik.

I did this for MBTiles, for storing (at the time, raster) map tiles at Mapbox.

I've used the mbtiles format which is basically just a table filled with map tiles.