I had another run, and I have unlocked most of the recipes before accidentally dying.
The run lasted 1 year and 2 months ingame, and I have solved all of the areas except the tier 2 woods. I have also gathered a lot of materials, and here are some things I noticed:
Something dead is surely overabundant, I have about 3000 of them when I died.
Something epiphemeral is scarce until late game, and then you get many bats to kill. I think this is by design.
Something umbral is rather scarce, and this severely limits the use of frost potions. Potion of rust is almost taking all of my umbral essence, and thus frost potion becomes almost useless.
I haven't figured out how to use potion of chaos. I just can't think of a situation that I need the effect of a random potion, and this potion is not cheap enough for me to try in large amounts to get the desired potion effect. Perhaps it's used to use the effects of locked recipes?
I've unlocked homeward crystal, rift potion and potion of frozen time. In theory, these 3 items could save from any danger, but I wasn't careful with my HP and got killed by a trap.
Collecting items indeed becomes tedious late game. I think it does need some work, either auto collection of some sort, or resource compression, and ideally both.
I have some new thoughts about auto collection: autocollect with queued action. With a given amount of movement steps, the game marks all items reachable in X steps and in sight. Then the character moves to each item and collect them.
I'm going to wait for the next update, and play again when I get to disable permadeath.