You can stop to get more food/water. Your character won't do it automatically, but you can cancel an action any time you want, or you can click the 'start action immediately' button when you're half way through something else. In either case, progress on the action will be saved, and you can resume it where you left of later.
That being said, I do agree that the UI needs work, and clearly it may be benficial to add a tutorial which explains things like this.
Especially with the idea of improving and learning on the next run, I actually think babying people throughout the intro would be a downgrade and something which takes away from the experience to a quite notable degree
Resuming progress shows itself if you try, X and queue is pretty evident too
It's just a case of not wanting to look at it and learn, shouldn't take it to heart much
Sorry. There is no obvious queue, no obvious stop action, etc.
Consider what a new player sees. They press a button, wait a few seconds, and get the result. They keep doing this -- press a button, see what happens.
Your description of a queue, and improving on the next run -- that sounds like either Idle Loops, or Cavernous -- and both of those make it absolutely clear from time zero that there is a queue and a need to restart/redo over and over.
Nothing like that is apparent when playing this.
