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.

So while basebuilding inside my frieghter, I removed a door while being a bit too close to it. This led me to being stuck in the walls of the frieghter. I tried to jetpack back in through where the ship is enters but I was still stuck ‘outside of the map’ so to speak.

I tried reloading a save but the autosave had made one post bug.

All out of options, I decided to make a leap of faith down to my planet. Luckily I had summoned the frieghter while on it, so it was as close as could be.

Burned through close to 2000 sodium, 450 sodium nitrate and 10 life support packs. By the time I landed on the ground I was completely out of resources and was moments away from death.

I had never been so happy to see one of those bastard venus-man trap plants that can miraculously harm you from a meter away. Zapped it up and recharged.

One of the best moments in my gaming life, despite the bug.

Why are people such @holes!!! Why build base next to an interceptor so no one else can get it!? And a light right next to it so it can’t be claimed.

Any ideas how to get round this or do I just give up!?!?!

What the title says. I’m sure some people may like this new feature but I don’t. I wish I had the option DEACTIVATE it.

We have got so many awesome new building parts this last update and I would like to be able to use them but the game keeps changing them and it’s making me crazy. I am so grateful for all this new pieces. They are awesome. But this new feature is ruining all my builds and it’s making it impossible for me to continue being creative. All the things I want to build get ruined because the game decides by itself wich window, etc. I get to use. This is no fun for me 🙁

My main reason for playing this game has always been building crazy things I imagine and being creative. I love this game so much because of this freedom to create. But this is not possible anymore… I had so many cool ideas to build and all of them get ruined by this feature. Honestly I hate it. Please give players the possibility to deactivate it so we can build what we want.

Edit: cause my english sucks