Hey there - I made a new save with all of the bz mods that are updated to 2.0 but without space age. Without space age installed, graphite can only be crafted in assemblers - however, making an assembler is locked behind science, which is locked behind green chips, which is locked behind graphite.
If there is some other way to get graphite I'll feel silly, but I checked factoriopedia and didn't see one.
I tested with SA enabled out of curiosity and it looks like graphite can be made by hand there, it looks like this is only a problem for non-SA saves.
