I will say that getting iron is a tiny bit of a tedious grind right now. I finally got enough for a maxed out hunter bow, an almost maxed out iron sword and atgeir, an iron mace and all the forge upgrades I can get at this level and just today realized that the iron cooking rack is actually progression and not just convenience.

That said, I probably pulled around 180 iron from the swamp I was exploring and still haven't been able to craft an iron pickaxe or upgrade my iron axe at all. The weapons in particular are very expensive for iron. The tools are slightly less so I may have just prioritized incorrectly.

I haven't even started crafting and upgrading iron armor. I'm still using root armor.

I didn't feel like copper and tin took nearly as long to gather in larger quantities - though I never made any bronze armor either I just used troll armor.

It was fun if time consuming building the road that let me cart all of that iron to within easy running distance from my karve though. I'm just ready to move on at this point. I probably still need to find and mine another decent sized swamp to do so though. Especially if I want iron arrows in large quantities for the mountains.