Title says it all. I was quite surprised when checking the recipes for reference to see that the rail recipe has been changed to use bronze instead of iron!

Turns out, having the mini-trains mod active does that... fair enough, but it's mildly annoying.
It would be nice to have two recipes (similar to small electric poles), so you can choose between using either bronze or iron to craft rails, at least when mini-trains is active. (with iron being consistently available)

I have an idea, which is putting the new Mini-Trains items (Mini Locomotive, Mini Cargo Wagon and Mini Fluid Wagon) into its own subgroup row in the Logistics recipes.

I would then declare four new recipes which will also be in this subgroup:

• Rail using Bronze
• Train stop using Bronze
• Rail signal using Copper
• Rail chain signal using Copper

The standard recipes would be left unchanged and use Iron. Researching "Mini Trains" and "Automated rail transportation" would unlock both recipes simultaneously.

Would this be okay with you?

That would be perfect! Inventory clutter be damned, at least it doesn't mess with factories :P

I've also removed the recipes from the Scrapping machine so you can't use it to turn bronze into iron.

That leaves us with one problem (which the original mod had) which is, Mini Fluid Wagons are useless early because you can't use Pumps. I could always duplicate this recipe as well...

EDIT: Actually no I can't, because Pumps require electricity! I would need to create a new pump entity (which would probably burn fuel to run), and handling the graphics for that isn't trivial.

And then by that point, I've already gone way above and beyond for a bit of mod compatibility. :P

The changes are up on Codeberg if you want to take a look.

I did not do anything with Pumps.

Tbh pumps are meant to be iron tech, better not change that. Besides, fluid mini-wagons are still moderately useful midgame/lategame for uranium mines (since you don’t really need to ship 50k sulfuric acid every time)

It’s a shame to lose rail scrapping, but to be fair if you got rail to scrap you probably didn’t limit your chests well 😭

Looking back at the recipes now, I think the "station from copper" and "train signals from copper" recipes are really unbalanced...

Reducing the cost of rails to make mini-trains viable early is fine, but by the time you'd want a rail system going, you should have bronze/glass/circuits set up fine and a bit of iron to make the few stations/signals you'd need.

Realistically, the only reason you'd use a mini-trains rail system early is for moving iron or gold around, at least until you get enough iron to research and craft regular trains.

I based the integration off of the Early Mini Trains mod. It has two sets of recipes, but I didn't want to add a new startup setting just for Mini Trains, and I don't think having a second set of rolling stock require iron is very interesting.

Train stops and Signals are some of those items I feel should be free, honestly, like they did with circuit wire and remote controls (maybe even the entire circuit network subgroup).