growing the crystals using something similar to the agricultural tower but over lava possibly for vulcanus, but lava isnt a terrain so not sure how i would implement that.
Oh, that bit's easy. Lava is just another tile with a few special conditions. Plants can grow on any tile, as long as it's part of their autoplace conditions. Demolisher Agriculture already does this, so this is entirely doable. I'm just a bit leery of over-extending agricultural mechanics. The Agri Tower has very specific and VERY complex visuals that I'm not equipped to tweak.
My idea was to use an actual placeable structure which would "grow" over time, but... well, that's a lot of control scripts that I don't need to do when the Agriculture Tower already does. Could always include "rock fish" in the lava :) But yeah, growing crystals like plants might be a good way to go. Certainly the most straightforward way.
maybe some sort of combusting bacteria on gleba that explodes when it expires, and cannot be burned (itll explode) etc so very difficult to dispose of if you produce more then you need.
That's effectively what Necrotising Bacteria already is, though. When it decays, it spawns a very large, very damaging acid explosion which affects player characters and buildings. I cloned the Gas Capsule's blue gas, removed the "enemy" faction restriction from it and recoloured its sprites yellow. It's... pretty deadly. A single explosion will take out smaller items like belts and inserters, as well as deal substantial damage to buildings. Each stack can only explode once, but you're in trouble if several expire in short succession.
My idea for Necrotising Bacteria was to be hard to get rid of, because it's not lost in most of its uses. Fuel costs 1 Bacteria, decays into 1 Bacteria and burns into 1 Bacteria. Every use for Bacteria returns as much as you put into it. Means you actively have to get rid of it to prevent it exploding, and it doesn't burn. Have to actively run it through a furnace. Was considering adding a "Placate Necrotising Bacteria" where you can combine Bacteria with Nutrients and get back unspoiled Bacteria - essentially reset its spoilage. I wasn't sure if it was wort the added complexity (for the player, it's simple to do), though.
So if I'll be doing something else with Bacteria, it would need to go farther than that. Plants (all entities, really) have a dying_trigger_effect that I can play around with, since those triggers are quite flexible. I believe that's triggered when the entity is mined as well as killed through damage, but I'm not sure. Still mulling over my options, basically.