"No, you don't speak English." He sighs.

He points at his own face. "Eric. I'm Eric. Eric Underwood. Do you - how do I signal friendliness - I probably can't signal friendliness anymore, what with the sword and all - here, have a fish."

It does not pick up the fish.

"Hrarm." It turns around.

...how sure is he that this one is sentient. Maybe it's just occupying a village created by someone else.

He'll open the chest.

He's going to have to put away some of the items in his inventory right now, but he'll get some green gems, some more bread and wheat, and what looks like dead bushes.

All right. He'll leave for now, and explore the other houses.

There's another chest, but it doesn't have anything interesting.

He wakes up a few more villagers, but they don't seem to have any hostile intent. Nor does the giant metal man walking around the village.

Good to hear!

Does that change if he begins harvesting the piles of wheat around the village for food?

Nope!

All right!

Then after he's harvested enough wheat for a large supply of bread - and maybe tried a couple more times to communicate with the villagers - he'll get back to travelling.

He's no longer all that sure that he's near any of the grey people that he saw before - it looks like there are multiple species of semi-sentient beings around here, and not all are hostile. But either way, he'd want to keep moving in order to find more useful items.

He finds another one of those tunnels with wooden structures, cobwebs, and railroad tracks.

He'll explore this one. Hopefully whatever built it isn't going to kill him.

Also, can he mine the tracks and cobwebs?

The tracks are easy to mine. The cobwebs take a while to mine at first, but if he uses his sword, they drop string.

And it turns out the tunnel doesn't actually go anywhere.

He'll soon find another village! It looks pretty similar to the first one, although there's one building that's taller than any of the ones in the first village.

Great! Loot the chests?

Nothing interesting.

Keep travelling.

(It's night!)

He can handle it.

After another day or so of travel, he's going to make at least a temporary house. If he's not being actively chased, then he might want to get back to trying to finding things to craft.

He'll discover watermelons while clearing out the area!

Ooh, tasty.