How to get 1 game object to effectively use 100s of textures.

So basically the project i'm working on is a Minecraft style voxel where i have chunk game objects that represents 1000s of tiles. Each of which have there own textures. Whats more the tiles are actually different in each game (the textures aren't procedural just the data surrounding them, they may occasionally have to deal with multiple layers however). Also the blocks won't always be cuboids, they are commonly more complex with unique UV mapping.

The problem i have is then getting all of these textures onto this one mesh, while enabling the tiles to be compiled from save files on instantiation and chunks to be edited on the fly.

I have a few ideas about how i might do it:

• using multiple textures as materials and just adding them to a chunk when

• splitting the difference and putting commonly used, or different shaped textures together and

• using one massive texture compiled at the beginning and just passing the appropriate uvs with each tile determining when and how to use which textures.

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Ultimately though i am completely unsure of the best approach and as a result i am making very little progress on the game in general. I am sure there must be ways to do it (as other voxel style games exist) however i am unsure of how to go about it in unity. Most tutorials on voxel style games generally start with the textures being neatly packaged together which doesn't work so well for my intents and purposes and so any help would be appreciated.

I'm personally a fairly experienced programmer however i have little experience with unity and only slightly more with c# or 3D graphics.