Trader quests progress from lower difficulty biome to highest. If the next biome is missing, you will have no destination. You will also not have the type of trader that goes with that biome. You can always wander around and find traders yourself. My daughter and I are are playing together and we only did the dig quest at Rekt, then just left the forest for the burnt forest, as I wanted something different, and just searched around until we found the big town and Jen. I had a basic memory of how RWG laid out the map. We did not even place a storage chest until day 5.
Play the game how you want, but as we add more biome progression (hazards/weather), story and end game content, it will require playing in a way where those features can chain together if you want that content to fully work.