Cooking water should not work require you to watch it for to boil

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

I’ve been thinking its kind of annoying having to spend hours in a day just sitting their watch my water boil instead of being able to do something with my time while I wait for it to boil, like read a book or something.
I was thinking it would be a massive quality of life improvement if some simple items that require just simple boiling or cooking could cook on its own (like boiling water or a simple chunk of meat on the stove). Of course to balance this out if you leave it on the stove for too long it will either evaporate or turn into a “burnt” quality, sort of like in The Long Dark

2

Changing some crafting to passive activities isn’t trivial, and a small discussion about it occurred recently in another thread.

If you e.g. make bread you go through several steps:

  1. Mix ingredients (active)
  2. Wait for the dough to rise (passive)
  3. Knead and shape the loaves, and possibly add additional ingredients (active)
  4. Wait for the loaves to rise (passive)
  5. Shove the loaves into the oven (active) that should be pre heated
  6. Wait for the loaves to be baked (passive)
  7. Remove the loaves (active)

Each of the passive activities have some time within which you have to get onto the next active stage or you’ll ruin or degrade the results.

Apart from the coding effort required (and JSON massaging of the recipes) you also have to ensure you’re not creating excessive tedium for the player with a lot of key pressing just to create something simple, and a lot of manual timing to ensure you meet all the deadlines.
It could probably work to require the actor to be present within a certain range of the crafting when the timeouts occur, and it might be possible to have some activities specified to be sufficiently passive to be interruptible to serve crafting needs (reading is a good example of something that should be possible to perform in parallel with passive crafting).

3

Its not a solution, but:

  1. you can get more clean water than you can drink from houses (boilers);
  2. water purifier (the device) instantly turns water into clean water for literally no power at all.