She spins the copper and glass into a pretty pipe, and runs it from her squeezer over to her carpenter.

She stands back, with her hands on her hips, admiring the steampunk look.

... and the water isn't flowing. She needs a pump. Right.

A little iron and glass later, she has a basic servo. She attaches it to the pump, and watches the water flow.

This is excellent progress. Now she just needs to feed sticks into the carpenter.

And make another generator, right.

When the machine is finished, she picks up the resulting dead bush and turns it over in her hand. Another pass being rehydrated, and she should have a sapling. But it's ... slow. And she needs a lot of saplings, to make dirt. Maybe if she had more generators, to fully power the carpenter, it would go a bit faster.

Well, if she wants to transport power over a distance, instead of just plunking down a generator next to everything, she's going to need some lead, or some gold. Or some stoneburnt, technically. But lead and gold both need to be alloyed and cast, so she'll need a smeltery ...

Ugh. No, no, that's all too complicated. She'll just finish making grass, and then come back to the power question.

She makes another carpenter, and then goes to put it down and realizes that she has no way to feed results from one machine to the next. She could just move the bushes by hand, but ... they're kind of scratchy.

Oh, except that she has those stone slabs from the chest — they move items.

She does that, feeding dead bushes from one carpenter to the next.

The machines whir, and then she is holding a sapling.

Now she just needs ... let's see ... eighty more. For the first dirt. And then one hundred and sixty two, to turn dirt into grass.

She looks at her machines.

There's no way she's feeding in the materials for all that by hand.

Well, she could use some of the little automatic crafters to make sticks to feed in. And the generators and the squeezer just need wood ...

She considers the layout of the machines. Hmm. She could rip up everything to make it work, but she doesn't really want to. There must be some way to just squeeze some more stuff in there.

She could put a transport machine under a falling anvil, to squish it very flat so that it fits between the machines.

Only, it's sort of hard to drop anvils, so she can just put it metaphorically under an anvil, and that would work fine too.

Heh. Alright. She might as well lean into it. Let's see ... she needs some stone slabs, and some glass ...

Oh, but the slabs need to be made from smooth stone, not rough stone. But she could make an infinite barrel of that too.

She starts with an infinite barrel of stone, and then makes some pipe — ugly, steel-grey pipe, but it's fine, it's just an intermediate component — and then a transfer node.

She looks at it skeptically. It might fit in between two machines as it is; it's pretty compact.

Nope. The anvil is definitely required.

Well, it needs a bunch of iron. More than she has, so she starts some more cooking in the furnace.

And then sits there impatiently waiting for it to smelt.

Waiting sucks. It's her dream, she should not need to wait.

Well, she's going to need a still eventually, so perhaps she can get started on that ...

More red dust, a sturdy casing ...

A still is pretty simple as machines go. Maybe they're more complicated in the real world, but here they're simple. She whistles as she slots things together.

Now she also needs a fermenter, to create the liquid that the still will refine. And that needs glass, but she's actually out of glass after making the pipes, and her furnace is full.

Well, it's not like there's a rule that she can only have one furnace. She plops down another, and fills it full of sand and wood.

Oh! Her iron is done!

She makes an anvil, and drops it on the delicate mechanical item-mover, squashing it flat. It's a bit looneytoones, but it works.

Then she sets up an infinite wood barrel to feed into the appropriate machines.

There! And now her machine will make her infinite saplings.

Slowly.

She sighs, and sits on the platform, leaning against the rumbling machine. Night has fallen again, while she works.

She thinks about going to bed at night, in her dream, and giggles. She doesn't feel tired.

Actually, that's maybe the best part about this dream. She doesn't feel tired.

Or sore, or hungry, or thirsty, or stressed.

She just is.

She watches the stars wheel overhead, tracing slow lines through the night.

She's going to make a garden, and she's going to fill it with flowers, and a waterfall, and then she can lay there and watch the stars until she wakes up.

She doesn't want to wake up.

It's just been so long since she has had ... time to just do her own thing. And she can never tell how much time is passing in dreams — what if her alarm clock goes off, and she never gets to actually make the garden? How wonderful would it be to just stay here forev—

No, that's not fair. She would miss her friends, for one thing.

The friends that she's always too busy to see. The friends who swear they'll make plans soon, and then it's been a year and she hasn't seen them and the only people she ever sees are her coworkers and her stupid ex-boyfriend and gods! When did she get so lonely?

So ... she can't stay here. Not forever.

But maybe for a little while more.

The dream-sun rises, and she rises with it. Just a few more machines to add to her little contraption, and she'll have dirt.

All this, for a bit of dirt.

She shakes her head and turns back to her crafting table.

She places another automatic crafter next to the carpenter that is producing saplings, and has it make them into leaves.

... and ends up with a bunch of dead bushes as a byproduct.

What? So she didn't need to automate the dead-bush machine at all, she could just cycle them endlessly back and forth between the carpenter and the crafter?

Why was this not part of the knowledge she's gotten about how to make things?

Well, obviously anyone can instantly know how to put together any machine or item, and how much fluid or energy they take to operate, and everything that can be done with them.

But knowing what materials are left-over after crafting an item? Don't be absurd.

Whatever. It's fine. She can just... dismantle her machine a little after all, and rearrange it to be a good deal tidier.

After rearranging things, she has a bit of an awkward setup where the leaves also end up back in the carpenter. But it's whatever — she can just have the next step pull from the carpenter as well. And just like that, she has something that will make her the compost she needs. Slowly.