Ya, probably
My guess is that it is for solid (uneditable during game) maps however.
I would think there would be some easy compression though.
X and Y location don't cost any memory because are marked as location in the ram.  Then we could use 1 nibble (16 choices) per block.  This gives us 2 blocks per byte.
So on an extreme side, of 10K byte map (easy enough with a map generator)
We could have a 25 by 800 quickly and efficiently
I hate using 666 as it just feels bad to me. (religious reasons that I won't push upon anyone)

Hey, I know what I'm doing.  I do have good ideas occasionally besides, it will be open source, so if you don't like my approach, you can always change it.

Opps, I missed your posts. sorry but I am on my desktop, which is very laggy.
I didn't mean to offend you or anything.
I didn't realize someone had taken this up.

Edit: I had to gtg earlier because I felt a crash might be coming.

Oh, so you're porting the paid version?
Cool. The most annoying thing for me was the gas pockets that you hit pretty far down. Also, hit 0 to teleport to Natas, and fly up and up to meet mr. Dog.

Yes, actually I did a try 2 months ago, but it was epic fail

>< This game is, indeed, addicting.

There are 10 collectible minerals, 3 types of bonuses, 2 types of hazard, and filled/unfilled. That's 17 different states for each square. If you remove a type of bonus (or make it so that one only appears above a certain depth, and the other below), that's 16 states, and you can store two squares per byte.

You could also store the map in flash, possibly copying the current section of the level into RAM. (BrandonW has routines for creating variables directly in flash.) Then, if you make the "empty" state 0000b, you can mark each square that been cleared as empty by overwriting it. And for earthquakes, you could copy the entire flash sector to the swap sector up until the point(s) where the map data is. Then, skip the map data, and finish copying anything that is after it (which should be nothing, if you do it right.) Next, use the map data in the original sector as the template for shuffling the level. Finally, erase the first sector and mark it as the swap sector; don't bother copying the map data back, because that can wait until the next earthquake. Of course, this would be slow. But if you copy all the code needed for shops, avoiding any OS or app routines, you could do this in the background when the player surfaces. . . . Well, just because you can do this doesn't mean you should.

power-up:
plastic explosive-clears large area
TNT-clears small area
quantum teleporter(unsafe)-teleports to surface
matter transmitter(safe)-teleports Directly to surface
fuel pack
repair pack

How about one (unspecified unit of distance) per bock, keep it at 1,000 blocks deep?

Who says it has to be mr natas anyways? It could be at 1000 blocks and be cthulu.

What about being able to place the dirt blocks you dig up? Not for Motherload itself, but....2D minecraft