I have a related, more general question.
How does Unity know which sprite collections to load when a scene loads? Is it the existence of a at least one sprite in the hierarchy that uses that collection in the Scene file?
If so, is it possible to load a sprite in code if it is not part of a sprite collection that was in the hierarchy of the scene file? Or, more practically, is it possible to force a sprite collection to load with a scene even if the scene does not initially reference any sprites from that collection?
I'm a bit unclear in general how Unity knows what to load in a scene, in terms of textures and models. Is it just anything that is specified in the hierarchy? So if you instantiate something in code that uses a texture that wasn't initially related to any objects in the scene's hierarchy, you will potentially be causing a small loading hiccup for that texture?
...oops, stream of thoughts there. That turned into more than one question.