I have been playing on the new map with injate, de, wesman, X and sub and it's been nothing but smooth sailing, good community. Injate and I did a crap ton of mining using stone picks and tbh it was just fine. sure I had to carry more picks but 2-3 was good enough for a long time. I've now got enough iron stored up that I may switch up to nothing but iron picks now.
We are already contemplating the subway we want to setup. It's been nothing but really good community so far. None of us have really travelled far as well because of the lack of gates and I find it much more akin to the old old old server where it really was "help each other out" not "stay off my propertay".
Hell one of the first things we did was connect our mines.