Happy New Year, glad you're finding it interesting!
You've described the challenge of the small maze size perfectly. I needed to advertise better when I made the mod, what a challenge it would be. When I called it Ribbon Maze it was inspired by "ribbon world" challenges, and they seriously force you to approach your factory differently. In fact, the classic ribbon world is 11 tiles wide, just tall enough for a rocket silo! So while Ribbon Maze supports vanilla recipes, it by design doesn't let you get away with reusing vanilla base layouts and blueprints. I think if a mod radically changes terrain generation, then it should have a substantial gameplay effect. So the more people find the default 32x32 size causes headaches, the more I see the mod as successful :D
Landfill and terraforming are meant to be a late game resource sink, about as challenging as launching a rocket. I actually think, it's probably still a bit less complicated to terraform than automating a rocket, except the recipes are much less familiar to players. Of course, many people never get around to launching a rocket even after hundreds of hours of gameplay! So I suspect it'll be quite common for terraforming to be neglected. I'm ok with that as long as people are enjoying the maze layout.
The idea behind using the super-heated steam is twofold. One, is it's actually based on a real industrial process! Steam-exploded wood fibres are used to create advanced composite materials. In the real world, nuclear power isn't needed, but steam >100C is. The other more important reason, is gameplay. Many players opt for solar power in late game to avoid the UPS cost of nuclear reactors, so that whole aspect of the game is often neglected. The recipes for terraforming don't need the same sort of scale for fluid handling as would be needed to run a megabase on nuclear power, so the UPS issue shouldn't be significant. So what this means, is it's an opportunity to use nuclear in your base and get something in return, even if you're using solar. 0.17 should make fluid handling better for UPS, so maybe we'll see more nuclear reactor use in large bases. In which case, there's still an interesting option to tap off some of that steam to make the geocomposite materials.
Biters are definitely the weak point of the mod. They bunch up because they are struggling to path through the maze. Maybe, when 0.17 introduces more modding support for units, I can come up with a dedicated "ribbon maze enemies" mod that can be added on to make them better suited to the maze. I've also been testing out other enemies mods, but there are a lot of combinations to try.
The issue of biters hopping through walls concerns me... Sounds like a bug somewhere. I can't imagine how they could do it, given they have the "player" collision mask, and the maze collides with more things than water. Do you have any mods installed that change biter behaviour, like Rampant, Natural Evolution, or Bob's Enemies?
