I like the wood harvester because it fits the theme of the early game and mods that prolong the early phase by adding wood-based production lines, such as Bio Industries. However, I also like how it reduces boring manual labor in early/mid game, before robots.

Natural above-surface resources -- trees and rocks -- add flavor to the game by enhancing the landscape. They can be rather a nuisance, though, if they occur in abundance and slow down building the factory. In this light, Wood Harvester is not only an addition to the game contents, but also a convenience for players.

In my current game (with Alien Biomes), my starting zone was right in a volcanic landscape with tons of rocks. By now, I'm a proud graduate of the Factorio University, Department of Steel Axe Studies. :-) Mining rocks takes far less time now, but with all of these rocks around me, it still is a lot of work. I therefore had the idea that having something like the wood harvester, but for stones, would be a nice. Harvesting stone should take longer than harvesting wood. Stone harvesters should also be more expensive to build; as one needs better tools for quarrying rocks than for cutting down trees, it would also make sense if stone harvesters required steel research. But once you've set down a stone harvester, you would have more time to do more interesting things elsewhere and return when the area is cleared. One problem could be that some rocks yield also coal in addition to stone; but there already are machines that output one main and optional additional products (see uranium processing).

Would you consider adding such a feature to Wood Harvester? If you think it doesn't fit the theme of this mod, would you consider creating it in a new mod? I've searched the mod portal for "stone", but couldn't find anything like a stone harvester. So I naturally thought of asking you -- after all, the stone harvester is rather a direct copy of the wood harvester, with only some data/values changed.