Is romance locked by post-druid-grove Karlach recruitment?

[BearBee]

I'm seeing a bit of conflicting information online. Is it correct that having her in your group for the party after saving the druid grove is the only opportunity to initiate a relationship with her? A lot of the options for things like offering to kiss her and such at certain plot points seem not to have come up on my current co-op playthrough and I'm wondering if it was due to recruiting her after saving the grove instead of before. I've seen at least one claim online that a similar opportunity to make a pass at her to the one you can do at the party can be unlocked by sufficiently high approval, but that doesn't seem to have been the case.

[Ellie]

I ran into that situation where I didn't fix her engine before the blacksmith left and it wasn't possible for me to romance her afterwards, despite the fact that I had her in my party the entire game and got her approval on the vast majority of my decisions. So I think yes, you have to get her sorted out before you leave the grove.

[BearBee]

Originally posted by Lizzy:

I ran into that situation where I didn't fix her engine before the blacksmith left and it wasn't possible for me to romance her afterwards, despite the fact that I had her in my party the entire game and got her approval on the vast majority of my decisions. So I think yes, you have to get her sorted out before you leave the grove.

Sorry to hear that! I was still able to fix her engine despite this, if you mean him leaving in act 1. After meeting up with the blacksmith at the Last Light in act 2 it seemed at least in my case to be possible to do the two infernal iron fetch quests to partially and then fully repair her. These just didn't appear to include any of the potentially romantic options most guides indicate should be there, which is why I'm wondering if the party scene was mandatory. But it could be something else (not enough approval at the time of the events maybe?), so I thought I'd ask around.