Ah ok now I understand, thanks. For the other solution, object count was going insane, so I fixed it by adding on Start of Layout. I might go deeper into your solution after so I can have a better control ( and understanding) of it. I'm still trying to figure out why it worked with new sprites rather than old ones. had to adapt my events to it.
*Actually is because I set in the sprite properties Collision to Disabled, then it spawns helpers on every one of them since it no longer detects overlapping. I was using a small sprite of 4x4 pixels that I scale up to use as collision since it reduces collisions.
I'm going to try and adapt the same to this mask instead, or is there any better way to do this?