I suggest that the digital miner gain the ability to chunkload exactly two chunks. The chunk containing its core tile entity block, and the chunk that it's currently mining in.

The purpose of this is to minimize the number of chunks that need to be loaded to allow the miner to complete its work. At present, the player would need to either stand on the miner and idle, or blanket the area with enough chunkloaders to cover the search area entirely.

The mining algorithm should prioritize completing full chunks at a time, reducing load/unload churn. It may need to load the entire area for the initial search, but afterwords can unload all but the ones that are actively in use.

While I agree this would be good, lets not forget that the digital miner does very few chunks. Like I am pretty sure it only needs like 16 chunks max, so a single loader will easily cover this area from basically any mod that doesn't load only one chunk at a time. So this could be a very low level priority feature, but a good one none-the-less.

Merging with your overhaul issue.

Speaking of chunk loading, is there something in Mekanism that already acts as a chunk loader, if so, what? I've noticed that when I have a few of my basic machines set up at base & then go manual mining away from base, sending things back via ender storage, they go into inventory at base. Just really curious. Help would be greatly appreciated. thanks you. :D