Concerning the wood production line and prerequisites: We've already had a couple of scenarios and packs where you were able to obtain wood without  prerequisites: Far Worlds, Western with the Trapper/Indian, Ruf der Wipfe and Zenshin, an old GWE Scen. While Western and Far Worlds didn't allow you to get any further without a hammer and Ruf der Wipfe had a trade system, Zenshin just set up a nice production chain by introducing a new intermediate material, a stick, which could be easily obtained but was just usable for basic tools.

If you want to replay Zenshin, maybe to get some inspiration, you can still get GWE on the CC, although you may have to fix the activated object definitions for the scen.