@monilenyan @SmashToday @eniko no it's fine, see, I had no intention of coding quarks or gluons or ant quantum mechanics at all really. I was being perfectly reasonable! It's just that in the real world, we've got a nitrogen cycle, and things like phosphorous and magnesium are important for plant health too, so wouldn't it be cool if we picked a few made-up atoms to be plant nutrients in every world, and then the player had to figure out different systems each time? And different nutrients might be bioavailable by default or might need fixing like nitrogen? We could have worlds where two different fixing ecosystems were necessary instead of one! And the evolution system would be able to spontaneously come up with stable ecological graphs on top of all that, so when you'd find an exotic flower to take back to your base, you'd have you consider whether the beetles crawling on it were necessary for it's survival, and what they might need to eat...
Well, I think you can see why the project never got much farther than that :)