It's probably been said a thousand times but here I'm again.
Barley its so necessary that its counterproductive to make it regional. Without it players dont have acces to straw and so everything depending on it like beehives, beewax, chicken coops etc.
Without the wax its a nightmare to craft wax and then you depend on how many times you connect and play a day and how far you are from multiple swamps. Building a minehole depends on it and using just caves suck a lot.
This could be helped with local trading, but at this stage everybody needs it and not all the people is friendly and this can lead to your death while trying to met people.
Barter stones are a solution, but since they require crystal stones its nearly impossible to build. I can understand how devs try to make progressions slower but this is a total failure.Big factions have probably acces and posesion of those crystals and so they have reached their objective while other people just suffer the lack of it.
Please make barley easyer to get and crystals spawn in normal caves or lower levels.
This part of the game is the worst one for me.
PD: In order to build a minehole with just swamp wax you need to gather 100 candleberrys. It sucks.