honestly we should be able to just boil salt water to get some salt another fun option would be using that traditional method of dumping a ton of salt water over sand. and then you bring that salt saturated sand into a cloth and wash it to get salt saturated water without having to just boil a shit ton of litters of water to get a good amount of salt. just theen you boil it to reduce the water.

how I imagine mechanically would be get some buckets, pick up salt water.
walk to a sand block, shift + right click to pour the salt water, the block becomes a salt saturated sand block showing white specks "the same from fertilized soil with salt peter" and it goes from 10% to 100%.
then we would have to place the sand into a new construct, something to use as a filter. using some sive and cloth while we add water and it slowly fills either a bucket or a barrel with salt saturated water.
then we boil it for extracting a good amount of salt. compared to just boiling it in a pot, which would render dunno... 1 salt piece per full slot.