Wouldn't the player be able to stockpile iron sticks ahead of the regular unlock, leading to the ability to make lots of medium power poles all at once?

But... why? Iron sticks craft so fast, I think it would actually be worse than just keeping your iron in plate form until you need power poles.

Truth be told, I did this because of the nanobots mod, since it doesn't unlock iron sticks, and I wanted to actually use nanobots upon unlocking them. Since for some reason nanobots in 2.0 decided to not unlock iron sticks, I figure this is a simple way to get around that.

I enjoyed the simplicity of this mod, so left a joke comment in support.

It is an interesting question whether the overhead of adding extra recipe unlock icons to three technologies is worth freeing the first-time Factorio player up to worry about iron sticks. I think the answer is definitely yes, but for existing players the answer may be no, so I like this mod.

Also like this mod. And thank you. I totally forgot this was changed for Factorio 2. I had a local (unreleased) mod that needed iron-sticks in the beginning.