Lowskill reporting.
So, I have read the discussion on a compound rebalancing and I have tried the TJWhale’s mod. The idea to remove oxygen sounds great, but it seems that finding glucose will still be a limiting factor, not the speed of a reaction converting glucose to ATP. And, from the balance point, vacuoles are pretty useless now, because cytoplasm is a superior choise in 100% of cases, because you rarely encounter a situation where you have reached the limit of possible resources.
My idea to solve the problem is that the glucose clouds should be even denser, containing up to a 400 of glucose each, but they should be really rare. The downside is that you can be just out of luck and won’t be able to find one before your death. It may be solved by giving player around 50 glucose on the start. The upside is that when you find the cloud, it would give you enough resources and time to find another cloud. Maximum speed of the reaction converting glucose to ATP will be determined by oxygen level and amount of mitochondrias the player has. But that way, having additional vacuoles can vastly increase your time to find another cloud and therefore boosts the chance of your survival
I think that’s a good idea and I hadn’t considered that problem yet. I think it would be good to make a prototype (after we’ve changed oxygen) to have very dense but rare glucose clouds as you described and see how it feels to play and fine tune it to find the right numbers to use. It’ll also be important that we balance it with hunting cells, so that hunting cells vs scavenging clouds are both viable survival strategies.
By the way do you mean my mod?
Oh, yeah, it was yours. Sorry for that))
I heve tried tweaking the numbers to a multiplier of 30 instead of 10. And since you have to find two clouds to survive, currently my idea is not possible from a gameplay point.
By the way, about oxygen levels. Will it be a good idea to start with low levels of oxygen everywhere and increase it over time? It will be accurate to Earth conditions and it will increase the pace of gameplay over time.
No worries 
Funny you should mention that, we were just discussing it over on the dev forums recently. Check out this thread, it shows what the concept is for it so far (we still need to finalize it though).