"I'm pretty sure I can just catch them with my hands, actually." Talking to Eric is very much like talking to herself, but who else is there to talk to? Eventually she gets all the peanuts she's likely to want soon and switches to raspberries, which she just eats as she picks. "Will plants grow in the soil here?"

“Plant seeds in the ground and flowers may grow!”

"Well, I hope that holds for Earth seeds, I'll plant a few and see. Three days will show my labors bearing fruit. Oh nice, prophecy power says it'll work." She goes outside and buries a handful of peanuts in rows in the cleared ground.

The ground opens up readily to accommodate the peanuts! As soon as a seed is placed, a small sprout appears.

Ah, video game instant gratification. She'll plant some strawberry and raspberry seeds next to the peanuts, then go back to chopping down trees.

Trees are duly chopped.

Once she has fifty blocks of wood in her cube, Eric gently hints, "Use your pickaxe to mine for ores!"

She will definitely do that but first she will make a door for her dwelling. Does the workbench make that as intuitive as everything else?

Yep! She has a door now. It mysteriously has brass hinges and a knob.

She is not even surprised at this point. The important thing is that now she has somewhere she can sleep without being interrupted by slimes. Now she ought to pick a good spot for a mine, somewhere not too far of a hike from her house but not so close as to risk her house being destabilized by it. Ideally also somewhere near a vein of something useful, but she has no way to tell that. Does anywhere around here look especially promising?

Well, as long as she's looking, here's a cave with some clay pots and a wooden chest in it. There's also the dull glint of grey metal coming from a two-foot square of wall.

Do the clay pots and the chest contain anything?

Yep! The pots contain coins, torches, and a sizable coil of rope. The chest contains some miscellaneous potions to add to her collection, a gold coin (small but apparently fairly pure), and a stack of ten platinum bars.

Hmmmm yeah she's going to steal all of this. If an actual intelligent being shows up to complain she will be only too happy to give it back. What's that metal thing on the wall?

It looks like the stone just... stops, for a two-foot square, replaced by dull grey metal. Either someone went to an enormous amount of effort to blend it in with the wall for reasons unknown, or something weird is going on.

Given the givens, "something weird" is unfortunately a lot more likely than "someone did something". She stares at it, pokes it, and stares at it some more before remembering the tree-cube and realizing that maybe this is what veins of metal look like when you're mining in this reality. Does hitting the metal square with the copper pickaxe produce an effect?

It pops out of the wall with minimal effort, collating into a neat little lump of lead ore.

Neat! And she can probably pick it up and put it in her bag much more easily than she could with the kind of block of lead she's used to, yeah? She'll do that and then keep digging at the back of the cave, at least if her pickaxe handles stone as well as it does lead.

Yeah, it's heavier than wood but it's still manageable.

Stone's actually a little bit easier. Also, stone collates itself into perfect cubes, like the wood did. Dirt does too, when it comes up, and takes only one halfhearted blow of the pickaxe to dislodge.

(Stone and wood can be used to craft arrows!)

It's not long before she breaks through into another cavern. This one is dark, no natural light coming in except from her tunnel.

Margaret's eyes, with their reflective layers and slit pupils, are optimized for night vision, but she can't see more than outlines--and something in this new cavern is dangerous. She pulls out one of her torches and intends it to light before stepping through. 

It lights up! The flame doesn’t seem to emit any heat, just light.

The torchlight reflects off a glittering red crystal in the shape of a stylized heart. There’s a living skeleton standing next to it, which turns to her and growls.

And that would be the dangerous thing. It's an environmental hazard rather than a person, so she sees no reason to let it go on being dangerous. She drops the pickaxe, pulls out the copper-and-amethyst staff, and lets the skeleton have it.

The skeleton has it! It takes five shots to put it down.  The skeleton continually tries to shamble towards her, but is knocked back by the staff every time it tries; the overall effect is kind of comical. 

Eventually it explodes in a shower of bone dust. It drops a silver coin and a mining helmet. 

The fact that it clearly wasn't wearing the mining helmet it dropped isn't really surprising at this point, but it's still funny. She wonders if she can even wear it with her horns on, and tries finding out by putting it in the general area of her head.

It fits somehow! The lamp on the front turns on, illuminating the cavern slightly more effectively than her torch. 

Also, she’s now wearing a transcendently ugly miner’s helmet. This thing is the exact opposite of fabulous.

Yeah, no, she was never going to keep wearing it. Blech. It can go in her apparently bottomless bag with the silver coin and the blasting staff; maybe she can use it for scrap metal at some point. Now, how about that glowing heart thing? That looks important in a good way.