Rather than have a ribbon maze, how about an open world where people start in a 5 by 5 chunk of open space, with some mixed patches of resources in the 4x corners. Then have paths lead outwards; North / South / East / West from the middle of each face leading into the maze.

example maze .. http://www.astrolog.org/labyrnth/maze/sarah.gif

That would need a completely different maze algorithm.

The strength of Eller's is in fixed-width mazes.

Most other maze algorithms take longer and longer the bigger the maze gets. Eller's doesn't, but requires the maze to have a fixed width.

When I saw the title, I thought this was going to be a suggestion to "roll up" the maze, into a spiral. That would be possible with Eller's algorithm, but, probably would just make the maze harder to navigate without really changing the gameplay.

What particularly are you looking for as a change, gameplay wise?

Yup, this suggestion was meant as a new mod to change the game play.

I have been watching some of the RedMew "crash landing" scenarios and thought that in the "Clearings" that have been added "Ancient Ruins" could be placed where resources were left behind (science packs, etc), but were heavily defended by Biters and weapons. Maybe these locations would also be the only source where a unique component for the Terraforming technology could be found. eg Limited quantities of "Rare Earth ore" that would have to be mined.

RedMew is amazing. Did you try Diggy? I can highly recommend it (I think it's still live).

I like the idea overall. It does sort of hark back to the collecting of alien artifacts pre 0.15. Maybe it could be a way of finding terraforming artillery shells themselves. That way, you have two ways to terraform: explore, or automate.