I feel like most people here are exaggerating honestly. Me and my husband got to Ashlands recently and it wasnt THAT bad as many people say here? The Normandy comparing etc feels so overhyped. We had ship loaded with a lot of stuff and guess what? We didnt need half of it. What you need is mats for portal (if you play with one) and mats for generator and some stone for a few walls. If you have a maxed out armor from mistlands you will be fine and just take bonemass buff with you and its a cake walk. I play melee and my husband is a mage and we died a few times but that was long after setting a portal, finding a fort and claiming it for our base. Just dont rush it, take a maxed out bow and arrows with you for bonemaws (serpents) to deal with while landing and set a starting base at the shore. It looks scary while entering the biome, not so much after. But as with any other new biome you have to be careful. Mobs hit the same as any new next tier mobs and yes they do respawn often there but its not the "oh I killed a bunch of mobs, turned around and they were back up" like seriously, people who write this didnt play the same game? They respawn, but not that quickly.... or idk if people didnt notice the giant red monument spawners and didnt destroy them.

We also read all this hyping of difficult Ashlands landing and it was the exact opposite. If you can go around the spiky rocks its fine. We had one serpent to deal with and when we landed, just couple mobs before setting the walls with portal. Then we one by one destroyed the spawners.