Can I remove rocks and other obstructions?

[Peter34]

Often, trees and other game terrain objects gets in the way of my grand plans.

Trees I can just cut down. But is there anything I can do about the various rocks? They appear to have a Health stat, thus suggesting that they can be destroyed, but neither my Iron Axe nor the later Steel Axe has any effect on them.

Do I get something later in the game that will let me remove them?

Also, is there a way around or over the lakes? Or are they just permanent obstacles?

[Boogieman14]

Rocks: yeah, they have a health status, so just shoot them Basic gun will take forever though, SMG hurries that up quite a bit, proper shotgun with upgrades vaporizes them.

Lakes: Nothing in base game, but there's a mod called Landfill that will allow you do dump a load of stone into it.

[Jythier]

Rocks: yeah, they have a health status, so just shoot them Basic gun will take forever though, SMG hurries that up quite a bit, proper shotgun with upgrades vaporizes them.

Lakes: Nothing in base game, but there's a mod called Landfill that will allow you do dump a load of stone into it.

Nothing like shootin' rocks.

Also, I believe someone was working on a bridge mod, too, which is pretty neat.

[Xterminator]

As others said shoot em! also, later in the game, a quick (and fun) tree removal option is to run them over in the tanks. Hehe
It will just plow right through a forest with no problem. As for water, there is nothing in the base game for that, but I think a couple mods that help with it, like landfill mod. If it is just a tiny pond, you sometimes put underground belts through them, or underground pipe too.

[warmadmax]

no one's mentioned,
because a rock isn't an "enemy", holding down space won't kill it with a pistol or machine gun

with default keys, hold down "C" while highlighting the rock to force shoot it.

you can also do this to chests full of burner miners you'll never use to destroy them

[Tinyboss]

Also, clearing forests with grenades is glorious.

[js1]

Personally, I think there should be an option to mine rocks with explosives, because shooting them is silly (although fun). Maybe somebody will implement it.

[Qon]

They appear to have a Health stat, thus suggesting that they can be destroyed*

*killed you mean. It's the correct factorio lingo.

There's a mod for making them minable though (chopped down like trees for 25 stone) if you don't feel like killing them any more. Also makes it possible to deconstruct them with robots (if you get the correct version) in case you need to clear a huge area for a megabase build. It will take a while to get there though, and it's not something everyone does.

[BlakeMW]

An amusing way to destroy rocks is to "push them over" with the car. That is, you don't ram it with the car, you place the car next to it then drive into it, holding down the movement key until the rock goes away. The car takes nearly no damage because it has collision resistance, when (lots of) tiny collisions happen the car's collision resistance effectively protects against damage. Pushing rocks over is pretty fast actually, comparable to unupgraded weapons and using no ammo. You can also push rocks over with the tank to reduce damage to the tank compared with high speed ramming.

Usually though I just get the shotgun and half a dozen shotgun shells and blast rocks away with the shotgun, it's cheaper than the pistol or SMG and about as fast as anything else. But it's not as amusing as pushing them over with the car.

P.S. the car can also "push over" spawners if you can somehow convince the biters/spitters to not destroy the car, perhaps by machine gunning them to death. The car takes about 10 damage pushing over a spawner. Possibly the least effective way to destroy spawners, but very amusing.