Mining machines are an absolutely awesome addition and are excellent tool to start the game - the way they clear the forest is just beautiful. There is one thing though - since they use biter AI for navigation, they tend to try and avoid anything that has a collision box including trees, when you order them to go through the forest with your remote.

Can perhaps something be done about that? If not, then its not that big of a deal, but if there is a way - that would make mobile miner even more useful, as you could use multiple at once to clear big area from trees for further construction.

The only way that it could ignore trees is if it would also ignore your base... which would be bad. You could do that sort of thing yourself using a Unit Controller to specify an angle and speed, but you would probably need to take steps to protect your base with safety zones.

Yeah, figured as much... I thought you could somehow specify what kind of entities mobile miners don't need to avoid using ids. But if you can't make changes to AI itself, thats not possible. Oh, well. The thing is - by the time you have enough time on your hands to make programmed order for miners to clear an area of trees, you probably already have simpler and faster means to do so (grenades, posion capsules etc,). Having them clear forest for you without anything but remote was too good to be true anyway, I guess.

I think the only way to do it would be to hack all of the games prototypes so that trees are on a separate collision mask and then everything else would be set to collide with them if they would normally, then remove miners from that mask... It's a big change and could have many unintended consequences in vanilla, let alone other mods that might already be using that layer (there are a limited number). I might look into it some time, but it's less of a priority right now than multiplayer support.

Sounds like a lot of work, so just forget it then - its not that important. But thanks for taking your time to explain :)