I'm willing to be if you used an impact driver for 8 hours straight and you were not used to it would make you sore the next day. That soreness is why it uses stamina. Just like Chainsaws and augurs also take effort to use and so should take some amount of stamina...so if they don't that's actually unrealistic. Hell, even just aiming a gun for an extended period of time gets tiring.
As far as I can tell, it's pretty much the same speed and the same return (tested breaking identical things with my level 5 ratchet vs my level 4 impact driver, with the same mods, so it should be pretty much equal in quality) but the impact driver DESTROYS my stamina and causes a ton of heat. I'm not speccing into extra stamina to get the exact same stuff, just gonna go back to the ratchet (which is hugely better than the wrench) rather than deal with this for a marginal, if any, improvement.
Gamewise would it be worsen the fact that strength is overpowerd. Now you can suffer all along until you finally can use auger and chainsaws to get resources without spending points into strength. It would also need a considerable buff in the ammount of resources you got out of auger and chainsaw since you use up gas.
I've done many specialist runs that fully invest into a single attribute. You do not need strength at all. POIs have chairs, stone/cobblestone/cement pallets, and tons of stuff you can scrap/smelt to metal or sell to traders. You get clay from buried treasure quests. I fully reinforce concreted my converted POI base out by day 30. Between the POI resources and the trader you an absolutely get the resources you need without being strength and it's not a problem at all. I've never had to dedicated mine for anything. I only recently upgraded to iron tools so I did 90% of that with stone tools.
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I've done many specialist runs that fully invest into a single attribute. You do not need strength at all. POIs have chairs, stone/cobblestone/cement pallets, and tons of stuff you can scrap/smelt to metal or sell to traders. You get clay from buried treasure quests. I fully reinforce concreted my converted POI base out by day 30. Between the POI resources and the trader you an absolutely get the resources you need without being strength and it's not a problem at all. I've never had to dedicated mine for anything. I only recently upgraded to iron tools so I did 90% of that with stone tools.
I feel like you're still stuck in a mentality born in old alphas. But mining is no longer the only way to effectively get resources and hasn't been for multiple updates now. Only serious mining you really have to do as a non-strength build is one overnight trip for shale. That's about it. Get the POI resources and use the trader effectively and you'll be fine
You can buy cobblestone and cement from trader for cheap and you'll continue to get stone, cobblestone, and cement from POIs. And yes, like you said scrapping is an option to get more stone since you'll end up with way more cobblestone and cement than you need. I'm someone who builds bases before iron tools and stone tools can get the job done just fine. TBH not having a claw hammer is a way bigger deal for me than not having iron tools. Once I have a claw hammer i'm set.