Any other tile can be Developed. Instead of a claiming system you're just creating an area with handcrafted/procedural parameters and there's collaboration involved with the other betas.
The overworld doesn't have resources, outside of Fishing at the Lakes.
This is a big system that forms the entire point of the hub engine.
Since it's an alpha, there's currently no limit on any registration herein.
Materials Registration
You pick a name (say, "lemon"), a type (more on these in a bit) and assign as many tags as you want from existing or custom sets -- this dictates things down the road.
Materials are then hand-assigned by you to different locales.
Refining Registration
Refining allows you to turn an item into a modified form, via some fixture. This will cost fuel and/or time (with the actual stats here procgenned).
You put in the name of the fixture (ie "Juicer"), the name transformation (ie "$ juice") and what gets targeted.
Instead of targeting a specific item, you can target tags -- for example your juicer could apply to anything with the "fruit" tag -- this would apply to both lemons and anything in the future tagged with "fruit".
Building a fixture requires some amount of items tagged with "wood" and "metal", procgenned. Some starting ones will be set up to facilitate this, but you can make additional ones that add procgen bonuses to fixtures made with them (less resource cost, less fuel, less time).