>>713782634
if you try hard with crafting (which is trivial) it looks pretty similar much earlier. In the second area for sure, but I'm not sure if there's any material in the first area good enough to make it quite this fast. Still won't take more than 3 item uses though.
main bottleneck is farming particles to unlock the 3rd ring on your items. But some of the early attack items can do this with only medium particles so it's not as much grinding as it might sound like.