Well, it's connected to componets.txt... not sure how though.
It is a NEW tech area, called "Internal Organ Mutation" and has 12 levels. It will not advance beyond level one in a full tech game, or in a medium tech game (tried RAISE LEVEL 1,2,11)... furthermore, if I set it's starting level above 1, it STILL only starts at level 1... I tried START LEVEL 12, and started the game with only level 1 researched.
I tried moving it's location in techarea.txt... no dice.
I tried altering point costs... no dice.
Then I created a new tech area "Organ Mutation", and set all the new componets to need "Organ Mutation" instead of "Internal Organ Mutation" and started se4. Guess what? The tech field that won't start researched has now become "Organ Mutation", and "Internal Organ Mutation" is now fully researched!
I thought, ok... I'll such switch the componets back to requiring "Internal Organ Mutation" and leave the Techarea.txt alone for now.... But NO!
, as soon as I did that, it switched back to "Internal Organ Mutation" not being researched.
To make a long frustrating story short, I tried a few more name switch-a-roos, but no matter what, the tech field that won't research is the one that the componets.txt uses... so the "bug" is generated by componets.txt.
To check it out, I researched out the entire tree during game play (you can research the techfield, it just won't start researched), and had no problems... and all componets were usable.
So I have no idea what is going on! I could try to alter each componet one by one to find out if a single componet is the "culprit", but that's over 50 entries! And what do I do if I find it(them)?
This is really annoying me, if anyone has some clever ideas/info let me know... otherwise this "bug" is going to be a "feature" in the mod.