Read research progress

Problem. You want to gate a feature on how far the player has got — hide an overlay until a mechanic is unlocked, or show a hint only in the early game.

Solution. ResearchManager, reachable from the session.

ResearchManager research = GameHelper.Core.Research;

Is this unlocked?

The narrow, stable interface — and the one handed to simulation systems:

public interface IResearchUnlockManager
{
    bool IsReachable(ILockedViaResearch upgrade);
    bool IsLocked(ILockedViaResearch upgrade);
}

if (research.UnlockManager.IsLocked(someUpgrade))
{
    return;   // do not offer the feature yet
}

Note the two questions are different: locked is "the player cannot use this yet", reachable is "the player could get to this from where they are". Content that is neither locked nor reachable is content the current scenario never offers.

IResearchUnlockManager is also a field on SimulationSystemsDependencies and PredictionSystemsDependencies, so systems can gate behaviour without reaching for the session.

The managers

ResearchManager is a façade over a set of narrower managers. This list is the most useful map of what "research" means in this game:

Field	Holds
Progress	ResearchUnlockProgressManager — what has been unlocked
UnlockManager	the locked/reachable queries above
LevelManager	milestone/level progression
PointStorage	research point currency
ShapeStorage	shapes delivered to research
ShapeUnifier	shape equivalence for research goals
CostManager	what things cost
RewardManager	what unlocking grants
LinearUpgradeManager	the incremental upgrades (speeds, limits)
BlueprintCurrencyManager	blueprint currency
ChunkLimitManager	the platform chunk budget

ChunkLimitManager is the one people are surprised by: the cap on how much platform the player may build is research state, so a mod that adds platforms interacts with it.

Persistence shape

ResearchManager.SerializedData tells you exactly what is saved:

ResearchProgress   // ResearchUnlockProgressManager.SerializedData
Shapes             // ResearchShapeStorage.SerializedData
BlueprintCurrency  // BlueprintCurrencyManager.SerializedData
PointCurrency      // ResearchPointStorage.SerializedData
LinearUpgrades     // ResearchLinearUpgradeManager.SerializedData
PlayerLevel        // ResearchPlayerLevelManager.SerializedData
PlayerLevelGoals   // ResearchPlayerLevelGoalManager.SerializedData

Useful for two reasons: it is the definitive list of what research state exists, and it tells you what you would have to migrate if you ever changed it.

Reacting to changes

Prefer an event over polling. The research managers expose change events in the same style as the rest of the codebase (IEvent / MultiRegisterEvent) — register on the manager whose state you care about, and unregister when the map unloads (run code when a game loads).

Polling IsLocked every tick is wasteful; the answer changes a handful of times per session.

Gotchas

• Read, do not write. Granting unlocks or points from a mod desynchronises the research UI and makes saves hard to reason about. If your mod is meant to grant progression, do it through the research reward system when adding content (add a research unlock), not by poking storage.
• Research state is per save. Nothing here is a global preference.
• Scenarios differ. A mechanic that exists in the standard scenario may be absent in another, so IsReachable is the safer gate for "will this player ever have it".
• GameHelper.Core is [Obsolete]. If you are inside a simulation system, use the IResearchUnlockManager you were handed instead.

Note

The manager list is read off ResearchManager's fields; the specific event names on each sub-manager were not individually verified. Check ResearchManager in the API reference for the manager you need.