Currently, batteries seem virtually useless outside of crafting: most of them store less energy than the corresponding energy storage blocks (which can now equally be carried in the player's inventory), but, more importantly, at any given point you can either charge or discharge them.

I think either having a new slot in the energy storage blocks, or, perhaps better, having a separate battery-based energy storage block, would make batteries significantly more useful. The latter could also possibly accept multiple batteries at a time for better space efficiency.

I might make a PR implementing this, if you're ok with the idea and if I find the time to do so.

Having a "battery station" block that would charge and discharge them directly was originally considered before I settled on capacitors. Since capacitors were added, I consider energy storage blocks kinda useless except for charging/discharging items, so I might rework those instead. Another important part is redoing the item batteries in general, since the tiering is kinda fucked (being based on 2017 NTM without current progression in mind) as well as having way too many variants per tier (why do the cells even exist??). I'll try to fix up batteries most likely after the gun or PA rework.