I try to build stairs in an mountain egde (we really need a stair tool!) and my hearthlings got stack. I managed to get the camera in a angle were i can see the blocks I want to remove and single mine (‘n’ tool) the blocks.
My suggestion
Allow mining about the head of a hearthling. Currently they are not able to mine upwards and not able to “free” themself.
From my tests they only mine blocks above them if you use the big mine area (m?), which in this case you will not be able to benefit cause it would ruin your stair…
But, you can add a ladder to the blocks and they will mine.
Aside from these, I also wish they could mine the blocks above their heads.
I would go even further and ask them to also be able to place blocks in that range, right now they only place at feet level (plus one up and one down)
I thought they’d fixed this at one point, but I suppose it was only for the 4 x 4 mining?
I also wish there was a better method for vertical/up mining. There are ways to work around it but they’re kind of tedious.
I usually settle near a mountain/wall so I can mine same level as my settlement, and wanted to mine the layer above that, and pretty much had to ladder up outside and cut another hole, and then ultimately I was able to work in some stairs between layers and remove the external ladder, but then you either need to fill in that cut (tried that and workers won’t do it) or live with a “balcony” and it’s a lot of extra work just to do something that’s usually simple in these kinds of games.
It seems like they want to keep the UI/controls uncomplicated but it sure would be nice to have a “mine stairs up” and/or “mine stairs/down” option ala Gnomoria/DF kind of thing. Even if you could get them to mine above themselves, cutting stairs up or down for mining is a common task and doing it repeatedly with the 1x1 tool, while doable, is kind of tedious.
Actually, they can dig themselves out, at least when it is only one full “level”.
I’ll make a video tomorrow, to show it.
maybe it works with some tricks, but as you can see it on the screenshot. its not working an an “normal” situation.
Even if you use n-mining, sometimes they mine overhead pretty well …
I have seen some other weird mining behavior too, for example sometimes they stop mining when there is more than one path to the mining area and the area consists ofdifferent sized mining junks (m+n types). When I look at the screenshots, there are more than one possibillities for hearthlings to solve this mining problem, perhaps this is one of this cases.
It’s totally hard to reproduce but I’m working on it 
Here a “normal” situation at least something that could happen.
One single hearthling in a hole.
http://discourse.stonehearth.net/t/how-to-dig-yourself-out-of-a-hole/20581
