I always find a place for a main base as I am playing. I usually look for a nice large flat spot in the meadows that is close to sailable ocean and set up there. I'll expand it as gather resources. When I find meadows locations that have lots of raspberries I'll pin those spots and eventually set up a small cabin and portal in the middle of lots of pins.

I do the same thing in the black forest with blueberries, mushrooms, and thistles.

I build a small cabin and portal at the foot a mountain that contains silver. That cabin gets a taming pit for wolves.

When I find an ore deposit I'm going to mine out I find the closest shore and set up a temporary portal there and park my boat. I then mine the ore and fill up the ship every thing else I portal back to the main base. When the ship is full I sail it home, move the ore to a cart, and cart the ore to the smelter. Then I chop the boat with my axe and portal back to the ore node and rebuild the boat. When the ore is gone I dismantle the portal so I ca set it up at the next place that I sail to.

For tin I just sail along the coast and when I find a deposit I jump out and mine it, stick the ore in the boat and keep sailing until the boat is full.

I build a permanent medium size base in the plains when I find a nice large flat spot because I need to build a Lox pen and have a place to farm barley and flax.

So far for mistlands I just have a temporary portal set up but I'll need a medium base there eventually to farm biome specific items. I'm waiting on that though. I'm visually impaired and the fog is too thick to spend much time there. I'm waiting until the devs finish tweaking things to make the mist more translucent or if they decide not to do that until I can mod the game to do that so I can actually play in that biome.