Enable devmode and open the debug options up at the top. Click spawn thing -> and type in coal. Do you have multiple types of coal? Basically we're checking if the game is looking for the wrong type of coal, as if some other mod injected a different coal type and some wires got crossed.

Ok will do. In about 5 days. I dropped that just before bed on my last day off for the week. Should probably have waited until my next day off to bring it up lol.

ok. finally got back to it. there are only WDCoal and WDMinableCoal on the list.
additionally, I've found that the pawn cannot be ordered to smelt the ore, neither in the bloomery nor the smelter... however they WILL perform the work on their own if assigned to crafting. so it's not completely broken, but it is quite odd

seems I'm having the same issue with simple chains: lumber as well... I know for certain that I have manually ordered someone to do this work before, and although I have recently trimmed Rim War and a few other power hungry mods from my list, this is a new save as of last night. I had been wondering if it there were some small chance that it had been due to removing mods mid-save, but apparently that is not the case

... and now the manual order is working again, somehow, at least atm. like i said, i'm at a loss.

@OwlChemist looks like this issue was probably caused by Performance Fish. After disabling TryFindBestIngredientsInSet_NoMixHelper in Fish's settings it works fine