We present a suite of algorithmic techniques for handling substitution tilings by treating a tile's hierarchy of supertiles in a purely combinatorial fashion using finite state automata. The resulting techniques are very convenient for practical generation of patches of tilings such as hats, Spectres and Penrose tiles, both random and deliberately selected. They also permit some analyses of the represented tiling. A particular product of this process is two substitution systems for the hat tiling which are "unambiguous" in that a single tile address uniquely determines the rest of the plane.