Power Cells and Air Filters should be your starting builds

[Spдceмдп©]

These two should be your starting crafts, not the Small Generator, Power Stacks are glitchy af, and when you craft power cells, a quarter of it's already consumed, my suggestion is to have the Power Cells not require any backpack energy during crafting and instead of requiring Compound, it Requires a Power Stack, this could also be implemented into the Air Filters and Oxygen Crystal Stack. and could also be the starting builds.
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Power Stack -> Power Cell (+70 bytes on first build)
Oxygen Stack -> Air Filters (+70 bytes on first build)

Small Generator 70 bytes research points
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By doing this you'll resolve the buggy Energy stack and give the player slightly more flexibility

[Mharr]

That seems to make a lot of sense, introduces the idea of raw power and oxygen crystals, and should make the step up to longer term / renewable sources that much more satisfying. +1

[lblackthorne]

Filters are way more useful than Air Tanks, since they extend your O2 supply by 8x and only take up 1 slot. They should NOT be low-tier research. If anything, they need to be nerfed so that they, at least, don't refill tanks, especially if they're supposed to be akin to a CO2 scrubber (i.e. recycling the oxygen and CO2 you exhale).

As for power cells, I usually just skip them since they're expendable power and energy stacks are easy to get. Personal batteries aren't even worth the effort except as a completion thing, since you can get more mileage from a generator or a small solar panel.

[Mharr]

I assumed for a long time that they *did* just slow your oxygen use temporarily. Converting compound directly into oxygen is odd, and their ability to fill more tanks than you're ever likley to be holding is a weird balance decision. You could make them high-tier, but then when would you ever need them when any vehicle plus some tethers provides infinitely better return on investment? One-shot resource generators in general seem like they *have* to be an early game bootstrapping technology.