A small mod that changes steel production in a way that is hopefully more interesting. Instead of smelting iron twice to make steel, iron ore is combined with stone and coal to form taconite pellets. These pellets are then smelted directly to steel plates.

Two coal, two iron ore and one stone makes one pile of taconite pellets, which yields one steel plate when smelted. This means that while this mod uses less iron ore, it still requires the same number of mining operations per steel plate produced, and the final smelting time is the same. Taconite is unlocked by the same Steel processing technology that unlocks smelting the steel plates.

Taconite is produced in assemblers as furnaces do not support multiple ingredients and I do not want to add an entire new entity for just one recipe, nor do I want to change every furnace to require manual recipe selection.

Taconite pellet sprite is modified from Realistic Ores iron ore sprite.

Bob's Mods compatibility

Make the following changes to Bob's Metals, Chemicals and Intermediates mod settings to enable smelting taconite to steel:

Turn off the cheaper steel and new steel recipe options, in bobplates (main menu -> settings -> mod settings -> startup tab, find bobplates in the list)