Originally posted by Rhapsody:

Well I don't know how you progressed, but it's essentially the same thing with the frost resistance capes from the mountains or plains. You still need to find a bunch of soft tissue and probably more extractors so you get enough material for all the gear and food. It's just a matter of prioritization to me.

You enter the mountains with the frost resistance potions available so you actually don't even need a cape if you want to keep making potions. Even so, as soon as you've mined just a hint of silver and killed the wolves that sound attracted, you can make a cape or wolf armor chest piece. It comes relatively quickly. I generally have one or the other built before I've used 4 frost potions.

By locking the cape so far down the tree you have to:
-Find enough mines for 5-15 cores. You can get by with just 5 if you want to keep building and taking apart the black forge, refinery, and galdr table. But I would suggest "normal progression" is to build each in turn. That, in and of itself, is quite a lot of work.
-Get the extractor needle from the dvergr.
-Farm and refine the sap.

By the time I had 15 cores (about 6 mines), I had all 9 fragments I needed and enough resources to build everything ... except the refined eitr. I was now essentially "done" in the mistlands. Now I'm just popping in each day just to collect my sap then back home to refine it and build gear.

With everything built, I head off to the boss. Two playthroughs now and that was my experience each time ... by the time I'm refining eitr and can finally build something useful, I'm done in the mistalnds.

I get what you're saying, I could have prioritized the cape or eitr in general sooner ... but then I have to build the table to repair the cape, then rebuild forge to repair weapons, then rebuild the refinery to continue refining .... ugh.