Ok, so I am an idiot and a drone.
I was told to follow a particular URL to test (idk y) and did that without further critical thinking.
They'd put in a redirect in Culture and Hostnames that took me away from localhost to the actual site (where i have yet to implement custom 404s) and me in my stupidity hadn't looked at the start of the address bar, which changes when I click the link from localhost to actualdomain.com/
So it was working the whole time, as i found out when I deviated from the strict set of instructions I had been given.
Trust no-one, least of all yourself.
right, thanks @Lamont , you tried to help, but sometimes people are beyond help 😆