A mod actively in development for factorio that adds decays to research
This repo uses Visual Studio Code, along with justarandomgeek's Factorio Modding Tool Kit extension.
To set up the environment, clone the repo and run the factorio: Select version pointing it towards your installation of factorio. That should generate an untracked file .vscode/settings.json storing that configuration.
This should be all you need to set it up and running with debuggers and etc.