Ok, imagine this situation. You want to make a sandwich with [insert random meat here], lettuce, tomato, cucumber and mayonaisse.

In real life(tm) you would go to the kitchen, pull all of those and some bread out of the refridgerator and then slap them all in between two pieces of bread. Time taken to do so is... Maybe 1 minute, depending on how far away the kitchen is.

Now in this game I am making to make said sandwhich you have to...

First you need ingredients. Which don't appear out of thin air.

For meat you have to go out and find then kill an animal. So step 1 is find an animal, step 2 is kill it.
But an animal that is killed doesn't suddenly become meat to eat. You have to butcher said corpse and get the meat from it. Step 3 is to butcher said corpse.

Now we have our meat (to make things epic it is DRAGON MEAT) we need Lettuces, Tomatoes and Cucumbers which we need to be grow. To grow them we first need to plow a suitable plot of land (Step 4), plant the seeds (step 5, lets ignore how I got them), water and wait for seeds to grow (step 6). Once they have grown we need to harvest them (step 7).

And finally we need bread. For simplicities sake we also grew wheat with the other things and harvested it.
Now we need to mill said wheat into flour. But wait! To mill things requires a mill.
So first we need to get out trusty pick-axe and go mining (step 8) then we need to get suitable materials (step 9) and build a mill (step 10) again to make things simple the process of building a mill is compressed to a single step.
Now we have a mill we mill our wheat into flour (step 11).
Now we need to turn that flour into dough. To do this we need water. But we first need a suitable container to collect water in.
I need make a glass bottle to hold water, which requires sand (step 12) and a furnace, which needs to be build (mine, collect have been done to make things quicker), step 13 is building a furnace. Then we need to heat the furnace, lets just use wood, now I need to find and chop down a tree (step 14), then bring wood to furnace and put it in then light it (step 15). Now I melt sand into glass and blow it into a bottle (step 16).
Now I have flour and water I need yeast. To make things about 20 steps easier (growing a suitable yeast producing plant and then extracting yeast from said plant) I just happened to buy some the other day and still have it handy.
Now I need to throw all ingredients into a bowl and mix (step 17) then bake the bread, to be cheeky I will use the furnace I already built to do this (step 18).
Now I have everything I need, and have to slap it all together (step 19) and finally I have me a sammich!

If I had gone through every single step (such as making a knife to cut the bread, extracting yeast and so on) I'd be looking at closer to 50 steps to make a sammich. But making sammiches after that would likely be quicker as I'd have everything ready to do so.
Also, at any point along the line I could skip certain steps as other people could have already grown, mined, build or prepared certain items I needed to make my sandwich (or I could have bought them). But for the first person in the world who wants to make a sandwich, they have a hell of a job in front of them!

So yeah. Is this many steps too many for making an simple item?

Although I want this game to be founded on and built by it's players (in a sense that players control the world which is not predefined) should I add some sort of method which can help cut down on a lot of the work said above?
But how? At the moment I am planning on having a wandering band of merchants stop by every so often with a random inventory of things to sell. Do you think this would work or not, and if not what would you do?