The borer should be gas powered and just continuously run forward until it runs out of coal. This may seem like an odd suggestion but the current tunnel borer is pointless as it runs off electricity. This means it needs ridiculous levels of micromanagement as you need to constantly replace it and place down more power cables. In a game about automating everything this seems like an odd addition.

added

nice different take, but the current iteration is now even more micromanaging - you can't rotate it as you could with the electric version, you have to manually set them one by one - you can't copypaste the settings (otherwise you could place a bunch, configure one, then copypaste them, doesn't seem to work) - also, the information isn't stored in the blueprint - I had a blueprint with all the borers facing one direction, with power poles in between them (you can space them by 2 tiles putting a big power pole) and it was a breeze to place them over the blueprint manually - not possible anymore for the above reasons

really appreciate the quick turnaround of the fixes!

perhaps also consider a new iteration (behind some expensive unlock or something) that behaves like the gas powered one (moving forward automatically) but uses power and has a power connection just like power poles: imagine a row of big power poles and electric moving borers, the pole would stay put, the borer would advance up to the length allowed by the pole you use, then you could clear an entire chunk at once with 10 borers or so

I get that at some point one wants to use bots for that, but maybe this could be viable before you get down for oil and blue science for the bots

so the start could be coal borers to be manually fed, then you unlock the electric ones with red+blue+military science, or something - no pressure, I can live with the coal ones if they get refined, although by the time you have plenty of power having to carry a lot of coal for clearing areas will become an additional burden due to the amount of stone you get by digging cave walls

another remark: due to the behavior of "keep going till you have fuel", the player could find themselves in the unhappy situation of having the inventory full (and doesn't matter if you walk away, you'll keep getting wifi stone in your bag) and you can't pick them up to stop them from digging cause, well, your inventory is full! :)

right now it's quite OP - they default to digging north, so I make a 1-borer tunnel going east or west, then place a bunch without having to set them up, and fill them all - 4 chunks on 10 coal approx, it's 20 chunks on a full coal load - user discretion advised

also: they can "walk" through other objects (I tried putting power poles in front of them, they kept going), they will also temporarily block the player if you stand on their path, till you're out of the tiles they occupy - they can walk on water, there's really nothing stopping them other than running out of fuel, and that's just coal - what with rocket fuel? ehehehe

incorporated your indeas

neat, much appreciated!

I am on 0.8.2, I can see the mod updated to 0.10.0 here but for some reason the game isn't picking it up, it still reports it as up to date as version 0.8.2 - is there some delay in the game picking up such changes?

uhm... seems like the dependency has been changed to require base 2.1.0, so I guess I'll have to wait till that makes it out as stable, I'll stick with 0.8.2 for now, as I have a working system for clearing out with the coal borers even without the added QoL

ah ok

is there any new feature you need from 2.1.0 for having changed your mod minimum requirement with these last additions? the version you released just 3 days ago works with Factorio 2.0 (that's the one I'm currently using, Deep Core Exile 0.8.2)