Yes. You could. But it would not be effective. It would require a lot of upkeeping. Imagine walking 200m pressing E and R, and them putting everything on a campfire for boiling down (also, I do think reduce the maximum stack off murky water would be interesting too). Limiting the maximum stack of murky to 10 or 20 would make is less interesting to hoard murky water from scavenging.So you'd need about three collectors running for a day to produce a single drinkable water/glue? That sounds like the distance between my base and the trader would be FILLED with collectors
Don't focus yourself too much on the example number. Think about it how it effects balance. It uses the same logic as preparing glue or gunpowder outside the chem station. You can still do it, but much less effective. You can outcome lesser effectiveness with more raw production. But it does not scale so well.
Also, how do you make the schematic/recipe available affects this. If you make filters like craft level unlock. It means you get somehow a linear time to be able to craft and that time will depend if you are improving that crafting, thus, the magazine drop chance. If you make it like a book or a stand alone schematic it will be more irregular to get it done. It could also be scrapable from filters or sometimes even fridge using the wrench.
IMO doing so handles some problems:
1) You solve the dependency from vendor.
2) You nerf dew collectors and make them less scalable.
3) You nerf scavenging murky water without reducing the amount of collectable murky water.
4) You can balance how effective it by changing how hard is to make a filter and how hard is to boil down murky water. (This is something the idea of purifying pills could fill in).
But it also has some flaws:
1) Dew collectors are not rain collectors. They indeed produce pure water but in really slow speeds depending on the humidity. The way I had proposed they are kinda working as a mix of rain and dew collector. I think this is the focus of the @AllTheGoodNamesAreInUse. Using a purifier inside the dew collector feels like it is a rain collector.
2) There are currently no mechanical in place for this. I though of using a similar thing as fuel to a campfire. But I don't know how hard is to do that in game, how much effort it would take. It so easy as a player to propose this, but not as easy to a dev to make it.
3) And it also comes with the discussion that. Worrying about food and water is a early game thing only or not? Do players want to be building steel blocks, crafting AP and hi power ammo and still worry about water?
