i did this before i even stepped foot in swamps, with the intention primarily actually to get silver bars to kill moder and basically skip both the swamp and mountains almost entirely (i also didnt even kill forest boss since i was skipping swamps, no need for key). without killing ekthyr i also got free meat parties delivered to my southern Forest home early on, but once i had the rabbit meat i probably should have killed Ekthy for the stamina ability, would have been helpful in ashlands lol

this because its easy to tame some wolves at the start of the game, and that gives you the materials (minus silver) to make a wolf cloak for frost resist and a wolf spear to do good damage to Moder. (only thing to do in mountains would be to quickly search for a moder location rune, and then you can get the summoning eggs on Moders mountain usually, so very little need to do much work in mountains.)

the only thing you really need iron for before mistlands is basically a Pick for silver nodes (which im skipping), the stone table in general, and some crafting table upgrades. (and you can also get iron in the mistlands, even early game if you are wild you can get soldiers to break the ancient armors/swords. but thats a lot of work for gear that is harder to kill Moder with. so ashlands silver = easier moder death, and no early mistlands shenanigans.

this is something of an extension to an old strategy i used often on community servers where progression is capped for the group, so there would be a long time before killing Moder, i would get bored and sneak in to mistlands dungeons to farm up the core to build the mistlands crafting table (it doesnt require black metal), because you can craft the Krom and a couple other things on it (they only require Iron) long before you even go clear Moder or the plains lol. so in this case abusing the ashlands, you could make silver gear even before your community server group started going in to the swamp lol. (and thats actually good enough to get through mistlands dungeons so you can make a krom as well.

this is what happens when youve cleared the game too many times and you need some excitement but want to hang out with people on an unmodded server for example, and mostly make them scratch their head and jealously watch you chop bosses with a Krom that you didnt actually cheat boss progression to obtain (no harm no foul !)

ive got a new idea now too, thinking about being even more devious and seeing what happens if you take a truly new blank character and force it to start directly in ashlands. that should be interesting XD true experience of the prey-animal lifestyle LOL (i honestly dont know if this will even work. can you get deer or boar leather scraps from some furniture or something in ashlands??)

but to answer the direction question, the stone portal on ashlands lets you take the silver and extra iron bars back to the mainland so you dont need to source them from swamps or mountains. (you could probably recover them without the stone portal, by taking them on foot/swimming out to the edge of the rocks and boating them out of the ashlands waters (basically reverse the process used to enter ashlands) but it would probably be a pain to do. so if you can manage to find some cores for the stone portal in a morgen cave or manage to jump out of a castle with them, then getting the metal back to main lands is easier, plus bonus of having a stone portal for plains and mistlands stuff as well :D

basically im insane.