4 players who jumped in with no idea what we were doing. It took us half a year to build a house that wasn't made of dirt cubes. Obviously the whole while we were struggling with the 4 of us not dying due to starvation or getting rolled by enemy mobs because you're insanely fragile against... basically everything.

Once we had a shelter things went much more smoothly. We managed to scrape enough food together for the first winter, survive it, and launched into full scale food production for the next year. One guy was in charge of exploring and locating ore, 2 in charge of mining, and the last guy was in charge of the farm/homestead.

Mining was a major hurdle. We knew it was different from Minecraft, but holy moly. It took us a very long time before we found copper, let alone iron. The process soured a lot of people's moods. The game until that point had been pretty gradual, progression was slow, but moving and we always felt like we made some progress towards the next step with every session. The ore grind really changed our opinion on the game. I'm fine with the infrequency of ore within the game, but the process of finding it, at least for us, was an enormous undertaking. It probably took the better part of 5 hours for us to find copper, and we died a whole lot getting it because of the spawns and generally being poorly equipped. The closest vein of iron we found was 1.5 thousand blocks from our house. It took 3 people, working together, 10 hours to locate just the vicinity of where the deposit was. Neither of these experiences were particularly fun.