I basically ended up making a farm in the Plains with a couple Workbenches to keep spawns out, raised earthen wall, with some Stone Wall on top of it. Deathsquitos still get in occasionally while planting, but they're easy to deal with. I assume another layer of Stone Wall would stop them entirely, but I've only had like.. two? intrude while planting 200+ crops.

As far as I know, I'm done with Flax now that I've crafted the Padded set, upgraded it fully, as well as the Blackmetal items I wanted. (Axe, Porcupine..)

On that note, I tried out the Blackmetal Atgeir for harvesting (secondary attack) and noticed it has a pitiful range compared to the Iron Sledge.. so I tossed it in a chest and still use my Sledge. Wish there was a Blackmetal equivalent to the Iron Sledge; it'd be a worthy upgrade. "Blackmetal War Maul" could be made to be really neat.

But anyway, the left side of my farm is a handful of singular square plots where I put the Flax, since I could use the corner-to-corner-fill-in-the-blanks method just fine. The right side is just one giant long plot that I just walk down now planting Barley as I go. If I manage to keep my angle well enough I can fit over 150 in there, and that's given me almost enough to fill up a Blackmetal Chest with Barley Flour.. which I hope is enough to keep the food supply going for a while.

I was more or less annoyed that the above method that I used for every other crop didn't work too well with Barley due to its large size versus the other crops, and was curious what everyone else did to plant theirs.

Thanks for all the input, everyone!

Now I just have to move out of the Plains I'm in as I've fully plundered it, and find another.. collecting Tar is kind of annoying, but the end result will be a really sweet base if I can find a suitable location. (Plains is actually surprisingly peaceful for the current end-tier biome)

The other Plains I found (quite a large one, too) bumps up on now-empty Mistlands, so.. maybe there if the terrain is forgiving enough when it comes to leveling it out. Or maybe the new Plains itself since it's quite large and I'd need to continue farming at least Barley anyway.

Still gotta take on Yagluth, but.. gotta go back to my Mountains base and fully upgrade the Silver Sword I've got sitting in there and then train my Sword skill to at least the 60s.. gonna take a while, hah.