I'm playing using this mod and rampant, and even with the damage scaling on biters turned down to one and research costs buffed to 8x normal (using technology price multiplier), tiny waves of the baby biters like 20 minutes in willl instantly complete like 15000 science worth of research. unsure what's causing it.

Which Rampant mod is this happening with? There are a few of them now.

dimm2101's rampant fixed, 2.0.10. rampant arsenal fork is also installed though unsure if that would affect it. if that's not enough i can post my whole modlist in like 30 minutes when i get back to my desk

https://imgur.com/a/2fCZh97 - here's the full modlist i'm using

That is a lot of mods active at once. I'm testing a new world, both with and without Space Age with this mode and Rampant, but I can't replicate the issue so far. Both by attacking nests and a simple pollution creating base to draw attacks. Are you seeing multiple research items being completed?

near instantly, yes. https://youtu.be/E19zRTSFW8M - heres a clip of it happening - https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/1321632918744993924/1354629223855165623/image.png?ex=67e5fc46&is=67e4aac6&hm=058f45bf4b309f29edcfc8dbd5fd6faa774f92b73fc172d1ee3c9e180c00ef59&=&format=webp&quality=lossless&width=670&height=122 and https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/1321632918744993924/1354629224140509378/image.png?ex=67e5fc46&is=67e4aac6&hm=882e3e32064296f070d54d53eb8f0ade6e25c89451503c9c99bf8de9381a14e2&=&format=webp&quality=lossless&width=710&height=117 are the screenshots of my settings

ok actually i restarted my game and it fixed it. i have no idea how. but it did

That's an interesting, and happy update. Not sure why restarting the game would fix it, maybe something got stuck in memory. With as many mods as you have running, weird things are more likely to happen.