This is very cute. I don't think I'd ever thought of having a cellular automaton where there's some global state that can change that influences the local cell rules. Would be interesting to add more control/energy variables like for collecting resources/food.
Pretty cool! Simulating artificial cells and observing their complex emergent dynamics has been an interest of mine
On a similar vein, have you seen this before?
https://github.com/chrxh/alien