The need for wood is going to be modest, and mostly in the early game, with resin acting as a modest wood sink until you unlock other sources of coal or explosives.

I was hoping for another use, but I can't really find anything. though I could be wrong. (Technically, you could manually plant wooden canes to get more out of them, because you can plant them much closer together, but this is a game about automation.)

Early game, it's no good as a fuel, it's outperformed by Cuttlepop, which grows on the same terrain:
Each Water Cane nets 2 (3 -1 seed) * 2MJ / 2.25m (2 minutes and 15 seconds) = 1.8 MJ / m
Each Cuttlepop nets 3 (4 -1 seed) * 3MJ / 4m = 2.25MJ / m

Mid game, you get some use out of it with resin and mulch, , but you'll be rapidly moving on to coal synthesis, which opens the door for easier explosives production.

Late game, it's mostly only good for grenades and mulch.

In short, I'd suggest some kind of alternative recipe that uses wood to produce something efficiently on Gleba(like Carbon) and perhaps raising the fuel value to make cane farming a better value proposition.

Cuttlepop pods were supposed to be 2MJ but I apparently typo'd 3MJ instead, all the way back in 0.1.4. I'll get it back to 2MJ in line with the other basic plantables whenever the next update comes out.

Ah, cool, that does make Watercane the best option early.

Another minor note, Excavation Brace should probably have space science as a prerequisite instead of lakebed mulch, it's not directly using mulch in crafting.. With a Gleba start, it's showing in the tech tree before you have the science packs for it.

Addendum, after playing with it a bit more:

Manually planting it is broken AF because it has such a tiny footprint, you can plant hundreds in a pond and have a tower harvest it. But that seems counter-intuitive, this is Factorio, you should be automating things.

I think it might be best to change the graphics of the planted version to be a clump of watercane instead of a singular plant, with an increased footprint, yield and growing time. That way the tower can get a lot more out of it and the player can't jam hundreds of the things into a small area.

EDIT: behold, water cane plantations: https://imgur.com/a/PGTTEtP
I can fit thousands of water cane stalks in there.

Manual cultivation being able to accelerate your "bootstrapping" feels neat to me, tbh

It is neat, and I'm abusing it because it's needed.

If I understand your aims correctly, you're trying to offer ways to bootstrap the early and mid game without having to deal with nutrients and spoilage while focusing on farming, logistics and terrain management and delaying serious pentapod interference. But, I think that the basic resources chains on Gleba still remain more involved than every other planet. It's simply more work to get started and to scale up in the early and mid game.

You're mitigated the fault-sensitvity and complexity of base game Gleba by introducing an alternative production chain for early and mid game, this is a great idea. However, I think that this alternative production chain is still more involved than it needs to be. You need power, you need farming (which has relatively poor yields and doesn't scale as easily until you go for yumako/jellynut) and you need something to process the farm products and then a way to deal with the spoilage, something to deal with the waiting time for bacteria and of course, the furnaces . To get this chain assembled and running smoothly, you're still going to have to do more manual work than every other planet, while constantly having to do something or other by hand because you're out of fuel and plants need planting or harvesting to supplement your fuel supply.

I think that there are three major problems with a Gleba start, even with Wayward Seas:
1. Early fuel scarcity and lots of manual work
2. The complexity/sheer amount of moving parts/failure modes even for a starter base.
3. Farming requires more work to scale due to the need to plan each individual farm around the terrain and set up logistics for it, yet it's still a lot of work to saturate even a single yellow belt.

For point 1, I think you can address the scarcity of wood/fuel by simply making the yield on the stuff you chop down greater. more wood and spoilage per plant. Double, triple, quadruple, whatever feels good. the stromatolites already offer you nearly 40 iron/copper per harvest. There's nothing wrong with getting a similar amount of wood and spoilage from the shrooms/trees/whatever. This will reduce the need to go out finding fuel or feeding productive plants into the furnace. You may also want to increase the yield of cut water cane, 1 water cane produces, a bit less than 1 cut water cane per minute. That's around 40 cut water cane per minute for a fully automated tower. A single mining drill produces 30 coal per minute, which has the fuel value of 60 cut water cane per minute. This is the reason why I am so critical of water cane. It's near-useless if you don't exploit the small footprint by manually planting every couple of minutes in a a game about automation. (also, why are we losing fuel value when processing water cane?, we're literally halving the fuel value and losing even more to run the machine)

For point 2:
All basic processing should be faster, running 8 assembling machines to process a yellow belt of cut water cane is mental, The same goes for cuttlepop and sunnycomb, you need 8 machines to produce a full yellow belt.

I think splitting the cuttlepop/sunnycomb processing recipes into basic and advanced variants might be a good idea. basic recipes would just output bacteria but be restricted to normal assembling machines. This introduces spoilage in the sense of having to wait for the bacteria to spoil before they can be fed into furnaces, without the risk of everything stalling out because you have too much(stopping the assembling machine) or too little(as fuel) spoilage. The bare basic starter base should be reliable and simple.

The advanced recipe would be restricted to biochambers (with the attendant +50% productivity boost) and produce semi-spoiled nutrients as a byproduct Having nutrients as a byproduct serves several purposes: 1. nutrients can be used to feed itself once it starts processing, 2 nutrients and bacteria are a great thing to feed into a bacteria cultivation stack. This offers a more gradual intro into the base game Gleba ore stack. You'd just need this and bioflux production to relatively painlessly scale up. 3. Even nutrients can be a waste product, having them be semi-spoiled means that they'll rapidly turn into spoilage, so they simply act the same as spoilage if you don't handle them.

For Point 3, here's some basic calculations:
A tower with 45 cuttlepops:
3 (4 pods per harvest - 1 as seed) / 4 (minutes to grow) * 45(the amount of cuttlepops) * 2(ore per cuttlepod pod) = 67.5 ore per minute.

A single electric mining drill:
0.5 ore/s * 60 = 30 ore per minute.

Even if you're using biochambers, you're only going to get a bit over 100 ore per minute for a fully saturated cuttlepop tower, and that's going to involve dealing with having to wait for bacteria to spoil into ore, spoilage, and nutrients....compared to placing three mining drills in a row and just getting 90 iron ore per minute.

a block of 8x4 mining drills will saturate a yellow belt.
You need 9( fully saturated cuttlepop towers with a biochamber processing stack to saturate a yellow belt, good luck with the two belts of spoilage, by the way, you don't actually have a good sink for that.

As for how to address this? More yield on water cane, cuttlepop and sunnycomb. Either at the point of processing or on harvest.

Sidenote
For alien biomes, I recommend adding a recipe that's only active when when alien biomes is loaded, to generate some cut water cane out of wood and spoilage, this allows a player to get things started even if the map doesn't generate the stuff.

I'm fairly happy with the overall state of things, to be real with you. The spoilage-clog failure mode of the basic crops is non-destructive (compared to the destructive failure mode of the "advanced" crops), and while their raw output of minerals is not spectacular, the fact that they'll never deplete and can be put basically wherever you want is a boon that raw numbers don't reflect. Slow is nice, so long as slow doesn't kill me, which is what the seas part is for.

Also Alien Biomes breaks a lot of Space Age things in general so I've made the executive decision not to account for it.

Can't fault you for that.