The New Crafting System is Deeply Flawed

In the Indie Stone's thursdoid post "Crafting RamblZ" on Apr 13 2023, they stated that they would like the possibility to start on a blank forest map and craft without looted items. Personally, I really like that idea too, so I tried it out in the beta. For anyone looking to mirror my experience, I spawned in with nothing but a pair of sneakers and used debug to move into the forest south of Ekron (past the river).

As it stands right now, doing this would cause you to be unable to interact with any major crafting systems other than Knapping and Carving; unless you devote a significant amount of time to foraging or Zomboid RNG.

Let's say you wanted to create a primitive forge; the first step to iron crafting. You need a bucket of clay cement, 10 stones, and a stone anvil. Stones can be easily picked up off the ground, and to create a stone anvil you need a stone hammer, chisel, and large stone. The hammer and chisel and be made easily enough through Knapping and foraging; same with the large stone.

This leaves the last ingredient, clay cement. You need 10L of water, 1 clay, and a sack of sand. Clay is easy enough to find, but water and the sack is a major pain point. The water must come from a container, in other words it cannot come directly from a lake or river. So immediately we need to make something to hold the water. Lets try a bucket, it's in the name after all. To make a wooden bucket we need: a hammer, hacksaw, plank, nails, wire, small handle, and small iron band. Immediately to unlock iron forging we need iron forging. Instead lets try a simpler container like a clay pot/bowl. You need water, clay, and a table. Again, to craft this the water needs to come from a container, not from a river/lake. So to make a container we need a container.

Remember, we're in the middle of the woods with only what we can forage and craft. Luckily, we can forage a bucket directly. It has an equal distribution (although very low chance) across all foraging zones. So lets say we forage our bucket, and now all we need is a sack of sand. Like buckets, empty sacks can be foraged in all zones. Lets say we forage one, but we still can't put sand in it without a trowel or shovel. In our setting, trowels can only be found embedded in Zomboids. Shovels can be found by both foraging and embedding in Zomboids.

So we fill the sack, make the cement, and finally craft our forge. This lets us make iron items like... trowels, and shovels, and buckets.

This is also completely ignoring the fact that ore veins can only be harvested with pickaxes. Meaning you would need advanced iron forging to start basic iron forging, unless you were to smelt iron items found off of zomboids.

TLDR:The current crafting tree fights against you at every turn, forcing you to spend all your time foraging instead. Right now the systems are highly cyclical causing situations where you unlock the ability to craft the things you just foraged, making crafting pointless.