For some time I thought of it as of some mechanical robot that walks and harvests trees and I saw similar proposals elsewhere, but it would be costly to implement for devs and would look awkward that you may construct such uber-contraption with base science and materials, so something simpler should be proposed. An obvious solution is chainsaw. I believe there are similar proposals and mods out there, but I care about vanilla. It just should be there and it's easy to implement.
Chainsaw should cost like 50 iron and 50 copper, be equipped in the tool slot instead of axe and deteriorate very quickly like after 50 chopped trees, so there's still price to it when you're on burner mining drills. With chainsaw in hand you chop trees at 0.1-0.2 sec per tree, other right-click actions take time as if you have no tool equipped at all. You have to manually reequip axe when you're done with forest. I am not proposing fighting biters with chainsaw, it's just about trees annoyance, so early games feel like a bright new life in the forest instead of chop-chop-chop-chop-chop for 5 minutes of real time. and then again and again and again for every new area of the base. heck, I started loving deserts for that
