I've been playing solo the whole time. It's fun, not too bad once you know what you're doing, but "hold my beer" moments will be punished.

Mostly I'm responding to point out that players have recently discovered that the old map generation tends to result in Mistland areas that are too small and not easy to get around in. The map generation system will be revamped for the update to solve this problem.

For a new player your choices are to:

a) start on the experimental build, which might have unforeseen problems in it, but keep the same map when the update hits

b) start in the normal branch and keep that map, with the risk of it not having a large enough Mistland area once you get that far

c) start in the normal branch and advance your character and gear as much as you can now, knowing that you can use that same character on a new map later and bring your stuff with you because characters and maps are saved separately and you can just log off of one map, and log on to the other, transferring stuff into chests as much as you want