Is the following restriction of cellular automata / tile assembly / CRN a known model?
If you partition $\mathbb{Z}^d$ into the $(d-1)$-dimensional slices $S(n) := \{ \vec v | \sum_{k=1}^d \vec v_k = n \}$, then your model is essentially a spacetime diagram of the $(d-1)$-dimensional cellular automaton that maps $x|_{S(n)}$ to $x|_{S(n+1)}$. The initial configuration $x|_{S(0)}$ has a special quiescent state everywhere except at the origin. If the CA is linear over a field of characteristic $p$, then these diagrams are $p$-automatic; if not, they can be quite complex, since you don't restrict $f$ in any way. They are not necessarily semilinear in either case. For example, it's pretty easy to embed a computation history of an arbitrary Turing machine in the configuration.