After read albion online continent map with region specific resources I was literally gonna make a similar suggestion when i saw this haha been meaning to do a post about localising resources away from each other awhile now.
I was gonna split it in 4 resources (Wood, fabric, Metal, Leather) and have rocks a general resource myself that can be found everywhere.
They other option is to add 2 more continents and have 1 continent favor 1 type of resource, seeing people are complaining about lack of landmass currently. (Or keep the current land mass as is and split the resources so west side has wood, right side has cotton on the east cont, and west cont is same with leather and ore. Only travel past between these continents would be the ports in the red zones to get to the other continents.
There a couple options of doing this imo:
1. Remove 80% of the resource spawns from each zone except 1 type in the area being changed to say wood area;s and like double the amount of trees in that zone aswell and do this for all the zones.
2. Greatly reduce the respawn rate of nodes in the area there not meant to be in and boost the respawn rate of the abundant resources. For example wood area’s would have a 400% respawn increase on wood but reduce the respawn of metal/cloth/leather by 300% or what not. This will greatly vary the resource markets between town and town.
I like the localizing resources to area’s like this because it will greatly alter the market value so the common material will be Inexpensive while the now rarer ones would go up in price. this allows people to buy the inexpensive resource in one town take it to the town where it is rarer vie OX trade run and sell it for a profit, so it creates a brand new play style for people to play merchants. With merchants come the need for Bodyguards aswell so then it also allows for mercenarys to take hold of the world of albion.
u should also leave some hot spots where one type of the rare resources may spawn in some zones like there is now with ore fields and all that so it creates a pvp hot spot since the ore there is now more desirable/rarers in zones that dont have ore in.