Pleeesss give me u ideas

Right now the air cooler and its recipes are in a weird place. The air cooler tech (as of recently, thank you) costs 3k blue science and gates advanced cooling and cryo cooling which is only 200 red and green. The air cooler is also quite expensive to make resource wise when compared to chemplants and oil refineries. Additionally, the cryo cooling recipe costs significantly more resources molten metal, water, and the new resource nitrogen, and then produces less plates than the chemplant (which also is the only one affected by the productivity bonus). I'd like to propose a few changes that could help this

1. Modify progression such that cryo cooling is less expensive to unlock(only red and green?), also make it unlock the cryo plate recipe at the same time. Then make the water cooling unlock more expensive (make it cost blue and cost more). Cryo cooling and the air cooler would still be more expensive raw resource wise, but potentially better than furnaces, then the chem plant cooling could come in later and supersede both technologies.

2. Modify progression so that the water cooling with chemplants is not gated behind the air cooler and instead comes before hand. Then buff the air cooler and its recipes so that it out produces the chemplant setup, and make the productivity bonuses instead apply to the air cooler.

3. Remove air cooler ability to produce plates and instead make it a liquid nitrogen producer. Liquid nitrogen can then be fed to chemplants in a new recipe that turns molten metal into plates at a better ratio, maybe also make it so that with liquid nitrogen chemplants can turn molten iron directly into steel.

Other ideas

my factories have been using a lot of water, it would be interesting to see a new way to make water that produces more or produces the same amount in a simpler setup

In 0.0.16 i changed the air cooler recipes. 4x :D, also now the tech wort lot more new machie added propably i change bit more in balance. Now i think is more balanced in space and cost efficient way. If i put everything to easy path the game is transofr into a boring, i dont want that. I thinking about to get sooner the tech but duno how yet. Btw thx the feedback. Any real life "factory" progresson/processing chain i greatfully apply to the game if any one wish i just need bit push in that.

I know you said you're thinking about balancing it to be more space efficient and cost effective so I just want to point out some numbers to keep in mind, not including any power or lava costs.

The new air cooler output seems a lot better now, though it should be said that you would need 320 air coolers making liquid nitrogen to supply a single air cooler making plates. The air coolers making nitrogen would need a little over 71 chemplants condensing water at all times to supply the water cost of the nitrogen producing air coolers. To supply the steam you would need a little over 14 chemplants making steam. Thats 175 assemblers making wood, and 56 more chemplants to supply the coal. You would then need 2 oil refineries to produce the molten metal and 3 additional chemplants to produce the raw ore. Not including power requirements that would be 642 machines to make 26.6 plates/second.

To make the same amount of plates/s with the chemplants you need 7 chemplants making plates, very slightly more than 1 oil refinery producing metal(ill round to 2 to be generous), 3 chemplants making ore, 1 chemplant making water, 1 chemplant making steam, 1 assembler to feed the steamplant wood, 1 chemplant to feed the chemplant coal
Thats only 16 machines.
It should also be noted that neither of the air cooler recipes can use productivity modules, which would be very useful on the liquid nitrogen front because of how comparatively expensive water is (plus the overwhelming need for liquid nitrogen to supply even a single air cooler for plates.)

For some ideas i'd like to refer to the liquid nitrogen page on wikipedia which has a blurb about production:
"Liquid nitrogen is produced commercially from the cryogenic distillation of liquified air or from the liquefaction of pure nitrogen derived from air using pressure swing adsorption. An air compressor is used to compress filtered air to high pressure; the high-pressure gas is cooled back to ambient temperature, and allowed to expand to a low pressure. The expanding air cools greatly (the Joule–Thomson effect), and oxygen, nitrogen, and argon are separated by further stages of expansion and distillation. Small-scale production of liquid nitrogen is easily achieved using this principle.[27] Liquid nitrogen may be produced for direct sale, or as a byproduct of manufacture of liquid oxygen used for industrial processes such as steelmaking."

It could be interesting to have an air collector that sucks up atmosphere, a compressor to compress it that then outputs different liquid forms of the various gasses. You could then have to route the different fluids to different processes, like the liquid oxygen goes to steel production in a specialized electric furnance, the liquid nitrogen is used for iron smelting, the argon for copper smelting, the nitrogen could then loop back around to the input of the air compressor to cool the machine off, where maybe it operates at a lower efficiency without it, or just requires liquid nitrogen to function at all

Ah, got it! Thank you for clarifying. This is some excellent and detailed analysis of the plate production chain balance in Factorio.
Your numbers really illustrate the dramatic inefficiency of the air cooler route for plates compared to the chemical plant method. Going from 642 machines down to 16 machines for the same output is a massive difference – that's a 40x reduction in complexity and footprint. The fact that the air coolers can't use productivity modules while the chemical plants can makes the gap even wider, since productivity becomes a force multiplier on the already resource-intensive water and liquid nitrogen requirements.
Your Wikipedia-inspired idea about atmospheric processing is genuinely compelling. A dedicated air compressor/separator that outputs multiple liquified gases (nitrogen, oxygen, argon) would solve several problems at once:
It would give the air cooler recipes a more realistic, interesting production chain rather than just being a worse version of existing methods. The multi-output structure (oxygen for steel, nitrogen for iron, argon for copper) creates interdependencies and routing puzzles that feel more like Factorio's design philosophy. The feedback loop concept – where nitrogen loops back to cool the compressor, or where efficiency/functionality depends on it – adds strategic depth and makes the chain feel like a real industrial process rather than just busywork.
The main challenge I see is keeping it balanced so it's actually interesting rather than just another mandatory detour. If the outputs are valuable enough for their respective smelting processes to justify the infrastructure, it could work as an alternative or parallel path rather than just making air coolers strictly better.