tldr; noportals deincentivizes interacting with certain parts of the game, which seems counter to what should be a mechanic to increase immersion.

My friends and I have been playing through a nomap noportal run because we wanted to be more immersed in the game world. This worked pretty great up until ashlands.

Certain mechanics in the game require you to be in a specific location in the world. Some design choices and recipes are clearly designed with portal access to materials and shops in mind.
Issues we ran into:
    1. Setting up food production
    2. Accessing shops
    3. Repair (weight of infrastructure)
    4. Quests

1. Most higher tier foods require ingredients from previous biomes. Notably, all eitr foods require ingredients from mistland ingredients, which can only be grown in mistlands. We were pretty lucky and we have a nearby landmass that has mistlands bordering plains where we were able to set up a barley/jotun puff/magecap farm, but it feels quite tedious to obtain food when we run low after exploring ashlands. In a normal game with portals, these sort of ingredients would be almost considered free.

2. Surplus gold seems to be designed to be spent on ingredients for consumables at the bog witch. For the most part, we haven't used bog witch potions because she's too far away from us to make the trip worthwhile.

3. Durability of weapons is generally a pretty trivial problem to solve with portals. Without portals, we've generally been hauling our infrastructure around for the max repair level needed for whatever weapon/tool we're carrying. Mistlands was pretty tough once we got black forge/galdr table gear, since this generally involved bring in a lv. 4 normal forge for the black metal axe, and enough mats to swap between a black forge and galdr table. Carrying this combination was around 300 weight. Now with Ashlands gear requiring level 3 black forge to repair the base ashlands weapons, this is around 400 weight before access to gem cutter (not counting mats to swap to a galdr table). Note that weight calculations don't include wood or rocks, which I consider to be easy enough to forage in the field.

4. The exploration and trip don't seem worth it for the rewards of turning in the quests. We didn't interact with the Hildir quests even though we found her.

To clarify, this certainly isn't a complaint; just some observations from our latest run and some of our pain points. I wish there was some middle ground between super cheap portals you can slap now anywhere and connect at will, and no portals at all. Maybe "activatable" portals at key locations (NPCs, boss spawners, starting location) that take you to a singleton portal that is more expensive to craft? Honestly not too sure what the solution is. Thank you for taking the time to read.