It seems that mining Quartz is currently impossible from start, so Glass and eventually Flasks cannot be produced and science cannot ever be started
Currently the only three ways to get Quartz are
- through a quartz mine on a quartz deposit (requires Quartz Refining O3 for the mine, which requires science)
- through sand and an automated screener (requires steel to build, which requires science)
- through a crystal mine (which requires a soil extractor to build, which requires separation tech, hence science)
I feel like the latter is the intended way, using a burner version of the soil extractor instead of the higher tech equivalent, possibly
It is currently impossible to progress to red science/science pack 1, unless FNEI is missing something

Steel should be unlocked at the start without any tech

just checked and steel shows up as it should in the intermediates tab (same place as vanilla) without any research needing to be done. make sure you've got the latest version. if its not showing up still please send me your mod list and a copy of the save file so i can fix any issues stopping it from working

The current mod list on this save game is:
Dectorio 0.8.9
FNEI 0.1.12
Pyblock 0.0.9
PycoalTBaA 0.0.39
ReStack 0.4.4
Squeak Through 1.2.2
auto-research 4.3.1
base 0.16.51
helmod 0.7.11
miniloader 1.6.8
pycoalprocessing 1.0.14
pyfusionenergy 1.1.2
pyhightech 1.0.13
pyindustry 1.0.14
pyrawores 1.1.9
upgrade-planner 1.5.3
vlads_AutoTime 1.0.1

The tech that unlocks steel (1 steel plate for 10 iron plates) is "Steel Processing" and its modified tree is "base > Pyanodons Industry"
but yeah, it also shows on intermediates and can be crafted, should have checked for that first things first. Thanks for clarifying

no progress with the seaweed too. You need to build a seeweed facility to have start plates but they need seeweed to be made