When attempting to craft 9 iron nuggets into an iron ingot, the recipe does not work.

Crucible is the only listed way of using nuggets to smelt into an ingot, however, you need gold bars in order to craft it. Progression in the mod pack is blocked due to this.

I just experienced the same issue in version 2.2. Just wanted to verify that this was not an individual issue.

This change was intentional.

how do we obtain iron then?

...crap lol

Just pushed the new update
https://minecraft.curseforge.com/projects/bounds/files/2600676