this might get patched out, because idk if this is an actual desired feature for the game, but it turns out that you don’t actually need to produce more atp than you burn. as long as more than half of your atp burning is accounted for, you will still produce just enough atp to survive, and even keep things like flagella or toxin vacuoles running (albeit, seemingly less efficient than normal) this does come with drawbacks, of course. as said, things like flagella and whatnot will run less efficiently in order to leave enough atp to scrape by on. your cell will also heal slower and produce oxytoxy at a way lower rate. still, if you’re playing something like a photosynthesizer, you really feel the need to scale down your cell, and are willing to puzzle together and balance out such a build, try and give it a shot.
Do you mean the movement energy? You can in the editor click on the ATP consumption bars to grey them out and move them to the end, then you can compare if your stationary ATP production is high enough to stay alive. The editor actually has a warning popup if you are so ATP negative that even while staying still your cell would die.
yeah i know all that, but the main point of the post was to highlight how you can exploit the way parts reduce efficiency to save on atp. like, you can drop a little efficiency from your flagella, in order to slow down your burning rate of glucose for example.