Raised free advanced components to 10. Too many things late-game require them or have self-dependent requirements which make it a slog if you hit a roadblock.

Might reduce that amount later but I figured if I'd go higher than 2 might as well go for 10 and get all bases covered.

The free components are awkward but simpler than editing many recipe requirements.

The game has more than enough time- and resource-gates to require massive deliberate roadblocks and weird requirements to artificially extend game time for a dozen hours.

I have added 2 advanced-components to the initial inventory. I don't think that's an elegant solution but they are a huge bottleneck into late-game and entirely RNG dependent.

You still need plasteel and gold to produce more from the fabricaiton-bench and those feel like proper, organic bottlenecks instead - having all of the three at once sounds like entirely too much!

I'm tempted to remove the medicine to balance things off but this might break playthroughs on biomes without medicinal plants, which I haven't done in a while, so something to think about..

I'm giving a big boost to Learning Factor now. This is mostly because on the worst-case scenario (big project, low pawn skills, no passions) researching takes forever even with multiple workbenches.

Increasing Research Speed further wouldn't be a proper solution because on best-case scenarios research is already lightning fast (maybe too fast, even) so hopefully this is a better approach.

Likely to be an on-going effort to find the proper balance between Learning Factor and Research Speed, given how rare worst- and best-case scenarios are.

Similarly with other skills, if you have some bad luck say, with Cooking, it can take many hours to get a single pawn to be able to cook second-tier meals.

Bumped work from 2x to 3x - seems to be good enough, pending further testing on a more labor-intensive biome.

I rebalanced the work speed changes - manual labor was a bit too fast and research still way too slow. This is likely to be an ongoing process but I think it's going in a good direction!