welcome to the forums. i'm guessing your iron, or steel pickaxe has worn out.
You were on the money. I thought you were being faceious, as I didn't realise that factory removal also constitutes "mining" and had never run out of pickaxes before (despite extensive remodelling without constructing ...

impetus maximus wrote:welcome to the forums. i'm guessing your iron, or steel pickaxe has worn out.

Cheers and greetings.
The issue occurs when I'm juggling around my factory layout ... And I've got plenty of pickaxes at the ready if that were to have been the case

I created a new game in 15.35 and have been chopping and changing my factories by hand quite a bit.
It appears that after I remove a certain number of structures (furnaces, conveyors, crates, etc) from the game landscape, all such removals take much longer - About four times as long as the ...