I am really impressed with the early game in this version, it's so intense.
The first few nights are scary, the mobs are trying to get into your base and you have to be on your guard and seal the breaches fast. The days aren't much easier, because there are suddenly wisps everywhere, and you need to figure out a way to deal with them. Things get easier once you make a bed, but even then mobs spawn in caves and holes and pose a threat.
The resources are scarce, I maybe got a bit unlucky and couldn't find gold or diamonds early on (I did get a diamond in a chest, which I attached to my pickaxe). That means no Botania or Thaumcraft. There are no gems either, so no Silent's Gems until much later. I actually thought about making a mob spawner to farm champion bags. That forced me to work through Flaxbeard's steam contraptions, and even use the exosuit (I only used about half of the mod in the last version, but now it's actually a lot more useful). Turns out there was some gold on my island, but I would have never found it without the exosuit jetpack.
By the time I finished the exosuit and all the steam infrastructure, I secured and cleaned a corner of my island and dealt with the wisps. Now I could finally farm all those meteors that made all that noise. Yeah, no... There wasn't nearly as much ore as I had expected, and harvesting them required quite a bit of work. I finally got some gems, and made a Silk Touch and a Fortune 3 pickaxe. After gathering everything around my island, I have this chest to show for it.
I looked at the more advanced crafting recipes, and this won't be enough to do much. Silent's Gems stuff requires a lot of these gems. Like really a lot... Just to repair my pickaxe, I'm going to use 6 of them. I did get a stack of diamonds though.
Some of those meteors are also dropping other stuff. There was an End meteor, which scattered Ender Pearls around it (I got 5). Another dropped Blaze Powders and Nether Warts. Pretty neat.
I suppose this is where the mid-game begins, now I get to craft all the cool stuff that I've been missing