So I played around with a new world to fully experience hardcore stumping and I've found something...cheaty? exploitable? bugged? I'm not sure so I'll just post this here to get confirmation from the man himself that it's working as intended. Here's my story:
I've been clearing a snowy forest of trees for sticks and happened to find I want to grow more...flammable wood like oak or birch so I decided to clear the stumps. I had a decent underground red shroom farm and enough raw materials to make about two stacks of remover when I spied...flint and steel. Thinking to myself it would be a worthwhile experiment to see if they burned out or just burned forever or even just light up but not burn up I decided to light five of the stumps in the middle to avoid catching the entire forest on fire.
After about half a minute, give or take three of the others puttered out and...burned out.
The last two burned for a minute more...with the one on the left burning for quite a while more before it finally burned to ashes.
So I'm kinda bummed out now, I half expected hard burned out stumps of hardwood replacing the stumps after all that...or something. Is this part of the feature FC, or did I stumble on a cheaty way of negating stump removers with a cheap nugget+flint combo?
And after I named this new world Cheatless XD. Give me a sign!
EDIT: I also expected the Stump Removers to go up to 64...but now I have almost eight stacks of the stuff instead, might as well ask about it while I'm here.