Personally I would want silver.

With wolf you can comfortably deal with the plains.
I don't like to glitch but I guess there is supposed to be some way to get in to / out of iron crypts.

Other than that...
go light armor and just outrun stuff?

Kind of hard to judge progression without using metal stuff or killing bosses.... I guess as long as you have a plains farm and have 5 totems you can call it good?