why does the sp def page show all those strawberry sprites? then they repeat the first 1480+ sprites and all the strawberry ones again. how are they used and how would you access them to create more custome sprites. when you go to paint you only see the first set of sprites.

Those are the sprites defined with SPDEF. If you call SPDEF number,X,Y,W,H then it will change the one in that number with image in coordinate (x,y) with size W,H of your sprite sheet. By default, all unused sprites are defined with SPDEF N,0,0,16,16.