He gets ten dirt, partly in case he ends up needing a lot for something and partly because being able to dig quickly and without strenuous exercise is so novel and fun. Now, what can he make with one wood and one dirt?

A roof!

He was already using a floor as a roof, but might as well swap it out and see if it's an improvement.

The dirt roof is thicker and has grass growing on top. It makes for a somewhat more aesthetically pleasing exterior.

That's pretty neat. He knows humans are biased to see minds and agency everywhere but this whole setup really does seem intelligently designed. If that's all he can make with wood and dirt he might need to get more ingredients.

There are many places he could look for more ingredients! He could try digging a deeper pit to see what's under the dirt, he could wander around and attempt to forage...

Yeah, he remembers hearing a mention of ore and that sounds neat. Deeper pit it is! With stairs so he can get out of it afterwards. Can he mine out a block and leave the dirt above cantilevered out, and if so will it hold his weight? Because that would be way cool, and also make stairs a lot easier.

Yes he can, and yes it will! His pit will be so fancy.

A few layers down—six, if he counts—he uncovers a patch of grey rock. The first one he mines yields {1 stone}, and it turns out that a lot of recipes involving wood can substitute stone instead—fence, floor, wall, thick wall, door, wide door, all the armour pieces... The tools still need {1 wood} each, perhaps for a handle, but he can substitute {1 stone} for the other wood in the recipe if he likes. If he hauls some stone back to the crafting table, perhaps he'll find yet more recipes with stone alternatives.

Stone by itself, not substituting for wood, seems to have only one handcraftable recipe, and it requires {4 stone} to make.

Nice big pit! Nice big square spiral staircase around the edge of his pit!

He knows a handful of things about stone and a handful of things about videogames and suspects that stone tools with wooden handles might be better at their jobs along some dimension. He makes a stone pickaxe and tries chopping two blocks of stone at once, one with each hand, and then makes a four-stone thing.

Dual-wielding pickaxes works fine, and the stone pickaxe takes fewer bops to mine a stone block than the wooden one. (Stone requires more bops per cube than dirt. No doubt there is some formula dictating these numbers. The number of bops is perfectly consistent given the same tool mining the same resource, if he checks.)

The four-stone thing turns out to be: a furnace!

Oh wow, a furnace! He's gonna learn metalworking!

He's gonna want a nice big house for all the stuff he's going to make, with a bedroom and a bathroom and a workroom and possibly also a kitchen. He starts designing a floor plan in his head as he mines some more.

Oh, hey, side question: what happens if he mines out eight blocks in a hollow square, two blocks deep, then leans downs and carefully takes out the block underneath the middle block? Does it fall? Does it break itself when falling? Does it hang in mid-air?

It totally hangs in midair.

Oh, that's hilarious, Bruce loves that. He spends an entirely too long time sticking his arm underneath it, jumping up and down on top of it, etc.

Okay, back to business. Is there enough time left in the day to build a big house with a stone facade and wooden interior walls and a bunch of what will for now be sparsely furnished rooms, or should he just park his furnace in his single room for now?

Ambitious construction projects should perhaps be left for tomorrow. Also, he still doesn't have the materials for a mattress, so it looks like he'll be sleeping in the bathtub again tonight.

He would definitely rather sleep in the bathtub than fight what he strongly suspects is a spider the size of a dog or larger, yeah. He falls asleep and dreams of floating rocks and bizzare architecture.

"Good morning, Forest Spirit!"

{good morning!!}

It waves a tiny pointy arm.

{what do today?}

"I think I might build a new house! A big one, with a bunch of rooms. Do you want your own room or anything?"

It bounces excitedly. {room! wow! yes please!!}

This little dude has such a high happiness set point and it makes them really fun to be around.

"Will do! Let me know if there's anything more specific you want; this kind of construction is amazingly easy to redo on the fly."

He starts by clearing a big area of trees, enough for seven rooms the size of the one he has now. Then he uses that wood to lay a floor and set up interior walls and doors, demarcating: an entryway/living room, which connects to the spirit's room, the workroom, and a kitchen; his bedroom on the far side of the workroom, and bathrooms off both bedrooms. Compared to his previous lodgings in a grad student dorm, it's a mansion, but hey, almost-uninhabited planet. It's not like he's a breeding population of humans needing to worry about sustainability.

The work goes surprisingly fast when he can build things by magic. Soon his mansion's skeleton is complete. Perhaps he would like to give it some skin next? He might need more stone to finish all those walls, if that's what he's after.

The forest spirit is very excited about its new room, even though there's nothing actually in it yet and it's missing two walls and a ceiling. Bounce bounce!!

He can totally get more stone! Unless he hits magma. Or balrogs. Or an index out of range exception.

He does not hit any of those things!

He does, after a few more layers of digging, hit an ore deposit. Ore is very sparkly. It requires a few more bops per cube than stone. In total he can mine {19 tin ore} before the deposit runs out.

There's gonna be metalworking! He wants to figure out this world's version of atomic theory. It seems totally possible that "wood" and "stone" are the equivalent of elements in addition to "tin" and that "tin" does not contain atoms with 50 protons. Is the sparkliness more like one thing with facets or more like one thing with flecks of another, shinier thing embedded in it?

More like flecks of shiny, but a lot of them.

It really ought to be possible to separate it into the shiny substance and the less shiny substance, then. Are all the things he's found as impossible to chip a bit off of as the wood was?