Oh, the "primordial soup" part is just the intro. After a few resets it passes quickly and is eventually skipped entirely.

Yeah I got past it pretty much as soon as I posted, which is kind of a pity. I like the idea of playing as a plant buying amino acids from the mycorhizae with hexose. The whole coal mining fungus with banking problems thing feels a bit too rooted in the human world.

Poking through the code though, I can see that that's probably not a problem that I'll have for long.