Finding the merchants

I know this topic has been beaten to death but man, I really wish there were some kind of in-game feature to direct you toward the merchants. Currently playing on a dedicated server with some friends and we've agreed not to bring in outside equipment, which means I'm SoL on Megingjord until I find that damn dwarf. I've scoured every black forest within Karve range with absolutely no luck. I'm bored, I'm annoyed, and I'm not really having fun looking for him anymore.

What really gets me is that the vegvisir system for finding boss altars is, in my opinion, really good. You still have to explore a biome and fight through its dungeons and points of interest to find them, but they're common enough that it isn't as massive a headache as just looking for the boss altar with no direction would be. I really wish they'd do something similar for Haldor and Hildir, especially because a lot of really good content is locked behind finding Hildir. In my last playthrough I was actually a little sad because we didn't find her until we'd already beaten Yag, so we steamrolled through the mini-bosses because we were way over-geared. I'd really like to find her before we beat Bonemass in this world, but like I said, no dice and I'm getting burned out on exploring.

I wish they'd tweak the merchants a little. More possible instances of them in the world, instances closer to spawn, or just vegvisir for them somewhere. Normally I'd just solve this problem myself by using a seed viewer tool, but I want to respect my friends' desire to play the game as intended and find him organically. I just wish it was a little easier.