How about making the researchers on habitat deposit districts cost less or no consumer goods, since they take advantage of the system deposit?
With you saying about them using system deposits and, by extension, being specialists in off-habitat logistics, it would also make sense to a degree to make the special research district ever also give trade jobs or make researchers provide trade. the idea being that the researchers are so used to getting resources from all over the system to run experiments that planetary deficits is not as impactfull to them.
You can actually can do this. Replace them in user_empire_designs.txt document.
I know, but thats a hassle. I wanna do it ingame.
I don't recall it being an option when I was playing Void Dwellers. For minerals, there's always the option of at least building an arc furnace. Maybe I should give it a try with a Dyson swarm and see if it interacts in the same way. It still has the unfortunate drawback that you need to roll 2 rare techs, though, which I don't think is a good thing. You're also limited in the amount you can build, which is bad for wider empires. I didn't check in my last few Void Dweller runs.
An update on that, the dyson swarm doesn't affect districts and I wasn't able to build any buildings that increase districts on my last playthrough
