Forge 1.18.2-40.1.47
Tiny Pipes 2.0.2
SMP server

Should be able to repro by simply making the 8 tiny item pipes with 5 iron, 1 silicon, and one chest. Place any number of them adjacent to an inventory in any orientation. Break them with a stone pickaxe. Wonder where they are.

I think I found them, but it raises another question.. maybe an item ID issue? I have an equal number of 'Redstone Panel' bits in my personal inventory as there are missing tiny pipes. I don't know what mod would use 'Redstone panel' bits, but I've never made redstone panel bits, so I don't know the mechanism that they'd go from tiny item pipes to become redstone panel bits.. but that appears to be what has happened.

This is normal behavior. Tiny Pipes is an add-on to the Tiny Redstone mod. The tiny pipe pieces are assembled as a Redstone Panel and can share block space with Tiny Redstone components. If you break it with a pickaxe, it drops the entire panel. If you want the individual pipe pieces, you need to left click with a redstone wrench.

In my next mod update, I'll add some documentation about that in the item description.

So if you put the tiny pipes in the world just on the ground, NOT on a redstone panel, they turn into a redstone panel? Because that really sounds like a bug.. (i.e. breaking a thing and not getting the thing back)

It's the intended behavior, so by definition, it is not a bug. The Redstone Panel is the block that holds the tiny pipes. That's just how things smaller than a block have to work in Minecraft. It's how Chisels & Bits works too. If you break chiseled bits with a pickaxe, you get all the bits in that block space as a single chiseled block that you can then place anywhere in the world as a single block. It's just how the system works. Confusing and counterintuitive perhaps the first time you encounter it, but not a bug.

Perhaps I could consider renaming the Redstone Panel to something more general. Originally, the redsone panel only held redstone components, but with add-on mods, it can now hold a lot of different types of small components.

I do intend to document that you need the Redstone wrench to get the pipe back. That's basically why I labeled this a documentation issue. I actually thought I had already documented that and was initially going to point that out to you. But, then I looked and saw I only documented the use of the wrench for configuring the pipe sides. So, I'm glad you brought this to my attention. I can see how it would be confusing.

I do want to maintain the current behavior, because it allows for more portable setups. You can move an entire block of pipes from one place to another without having to break all the little bits and reassemble them somewhere else. (FYI: you can also make blueprints using the Tiny Redstone blueprints to copy and duplicate them).

By the way, in case it's still not clear, you can get the pipes pieces back by placing the panel in world, and then using the redstone wrench to break them.

Changed name of dropped item to "Tiny Component Container". This should help a bit with the confusion for now.

I am considering reversing this behavior so that the redstone wrench is required to drop the entire container and hitting with a pickaxe drops individual components. It might be more intuitive that way, but it might be disruptive for existing users. This may be challenging to implement, especially since we might not want it to insta-break as it does with the wrench due to the potential for accidental breaking. Hmm.. many vanilla redstone components do insta-break, even without a tool, so maybe that's not a problem.

Feedback welcome.

Opened this issue dannydjdk/Tiny-Redstone#108 regarding changes to block breaking, since the changes will need to happen in that mod. Future commits will be tagged there.

Will keep this issue open until either the process is sufficiently documented, or it becomes intuitive enough that further documentation is not required.