An important form of self organization is autocatalysis, a process in which heterogenous molecule or unit types mutually reproduce each other. In the standard ODE model of this process the number of possible molecule types in the resulting "hypercycles" is limited eventually by increasingly large swings in the populations of molecule types, a barrier to complexity. In developing work, I show that when the hypercycle model includes a malleable resource environment, this barrier disappears. This fact highlights the importance of niche construction in evolutionary processes but also introduces new features and raises new questions.