Doing one of those Faux Pas things and pasting a quote from Snipe from discord for this one.
Generally Discord quotes express thoughts, or current intents, and can always be subject to change. For this one though I think it's safe the meat of the system makes it to launch ontouched.
Snipehunter 🌩07/18/2019
To answer your question, when you decide to set your character to spend time researching, you can research in one of two modes. You can either say "Hey research this craft, or skill, or item" (which will result in gaining "tech tree" style advances over time in the form of new recipes you discover), or you can say "I want to create a research proposal where I will try to research this specific technology using this skill" (which will also get you tech tree gains, but it at the same time it tells us Devs what you're trying to research and if we accept your proposal, it will go into the production chain so that when its ready, you'll have a research "Breakthrough" and end up with that recipe. In theory you should have also discovered the recipes for the parts your final product is made from along the way too, but in rare cases you may need to do additional research to gain those recipes.)
