There is a time and place for such things in design that goes beyond just wasting people’s time.

Constructive uses for it are either:

a) Short term – make people stick around for a bit, a mandatory mini-break as whatever countdown is ticking down is doing its thing. The first settlement building does that with its <3 minute timer steps. You look around the settlement, take in the scenery, and all that jazz. Given how short it is it usually does not register als negative.

b) Long Term – build anticipation. THIS is where one hour and up timers clock in, but there’s just one massive flaw with the current settlement timers: nothing we have seen so for justfies any sort of anticipation. A market building that has zero mechanical functionality? A house for npcs? As a player I couldn’t give two shits about that. That’s just filler on the side to strech the way to the actually good stuff – which usually is “stuff that allows you to do things that you usually could not do in the game previously”.

There sure is quite some potential to what those “new possibility” buildings can be, from building your own portal to production facilities to (and this now is super wishful thinking for future upgrades) a space hangar for spacecraft building. THAT’s the sort of stuff I’d consider a few hours worth in building the anticipation, even if it is usually unnecessary to have the timer over a hour.

The ONLY other way where high countdowns would be ok would be “overnight projects”. You kick it off before going to bed, and next day you log on happy about your new thing. However, this needs to be stuff one actually looks forward to, instead of “generic random building #324 that increases some internal settlement stat randomy and does nothing for the player”.

Also, having zero interaction with said timer is absolutely stupid if you already set the timers that high. It’s my settlement, let me help by throwing extra resources at it or completing quests (“local wildlife/sentinels is interfering with construction, kill X to speed up process by Y%”)

Time gates have a place in game design, except HG seems to put them in there with the sole and only intent to waste player time. And no, it’s not contributing to the immersion – if it was established for years that you can build a darn LANDING PAD with the click of a button suddenly blocking everything for HOURS is not immersive, it’s just the game giving me the finger. Small timers of a few minutes are immersive. Anything above that is just someone trying to get on my nerves.