Wood Harvester

[Vexos]

A machine or robot that hunts for trees on a huge area and slowly harvest wood and clear the area, as a mean of viably collect wood for fuel (or other uses), specially on the early game.
This game is about automation after all. Clearing trees is only viable with hand work or telling the robots to do it on advanced stages, like and active harvesting.
The early game can be very slow and boring with huge forests that overlap other resources. And is a way of using forests advantageously instead of rushing to grenades to blow them up out of the way.
I didnt found any mod that does this, but there is tons of mods that provide multiple means of using wood.

[loganb]

+1 I've been playing Bob's Mods and I like how it introduces more of a need for wood, but then it makes chopping wood in the early game quite excruciating.

[ssilk]

I think there are several stages in the game depending wood and this suggestion should explain first, at which stage it tries to fix a problem.
(Early game, after power, after circuits, after blue potion, after robots...)

There are also several mods about this topic!!

[aober93]

Yea in the beginning it can become stupid if youre starting in a forest. But noobs dont tend to build fast and big and will work around it not realizing what's coming. And pros can use the flamethrower and thats not hard to get if you know how to play, start in a favourable spot, work around it, use the steel axe, drive a tank and lastly build a personal roboport to raze forests pretty soon as well.

[warrends]

Or ... enable early research for an actual "Wood Harvester". Some kind of machine that runs on fuel (coal, or possibly could feed itself with the wood it collects). Make the machine, fuel it up, place it in or near a forest, and generate the path you want it to take (drag the mouse pointer around for a path, or else define a rectangle which it will clear). It would only hold so much wood so every so often perhaps it would need to run to a box to dump its load.

To make it, keep it relatively easy for the early game. Iron, copper, gear wheels, green circuits, that kind of stuff. Electric motors are (maybe) too much, but perhaps if you can level the machine up then motors could be used at that point (faster, can hold more chopped wood, ...)

I think this would be kinda cool! Rudimentary for a game and environment where the science and tech gets so complex, but for the early game this would be a neat and fun thing to do.

[Vexos]

I think there are several stages in the game depending wood and this suggestion should explain first, at which stage it tries to fix a problem.
(Early game, after power, after circuits, after blue potion, after robots...)

There are also several mods about this topic!!

Looking at the tech tree, the only two diferences on wood harvesting is the steel pickaxe (red science) which improves only the speed of harvesting single trees and the construction bots which enable entire area clears but still need to be operated manually.

And pros can use the flamethrower and thats not hard to get if you know how to play, start in a favourable spot, work around it, use the steel axe, drive a tank and lastly build a personal roboport to raze forests pretty soon as well.

You just reinforced my argue that the best way is getting rid of the forest by destroying it as fast as possible and not harvesting it. And all these methods you mentioned are about actively destroing it.

There is no method in the game that you can set up a harvester and after some minutes you say " Lets see how the forest harvest/clearing is going..." , instead you say "I have to destroy/clear this forest because I'm out of room to build"

There is no automation in the wood harvesting/clearing process. After robots you have a way to get rid of a big forest with ease, but that is almost late game.

As a concrete example it could be a building like a mining drill but with much bigger area of effect.