Eric shakes his head. "You can make a bed at a sawmill using five silk and ten wood. You can make a sawmill at a workbench with ten wood, two lead bars, and a lead chain."

Furnace and connecting door works, though. Despite the roaring flame within the stone chamber, it only emanates about as much heat as the back of a refrigerator.

Can some of those shackles the zombies dropped be turned into a lead chain?

The furnace will allow her to melt them down into iron bars, one bar per shackle! Then she can turn a bar into ten chains at a workbench.

"Lead and iron are interchangeable," Eric notes.

Does he just mean that in terms of making sawmills, or what? As soon as her sawmill is done she turns one of her finger-scales into a magnet and checks whether lead and iron are in fact still different on that score.

...nope, lead is magnetic now apparently.

Well that has potentially terrifying implications on the atomic level! She's glad she discovered this before eating any of the local flora or fauna and trying to e.g. use the iron in them in her hemoglobin. It's kind of a wonder that the air is breathable, except for how everything here has a deliberately-designed vibe going on. She's still going to stick to food she makes herself unless she starts noticing nutrient deficiencies, though.

"Fish is good for you," Eric says somewhat reproachfully.

It's nice when he says stuff that's kind of like making conversation. "Maybe it is and maybe it isn't. Tell me more about mana crystals?" 

"If you gather 3 fallen stars, they can be combined into an item that will increase your mana capacity. You can consume up to 9 mana crystals. Drinking mana potions will restore your mana, but reduce your spell damage temporarily."

Okay then. She pulls out three of her fallen stars and shoves them at each other.

She has s blue star-shaped crystal now! As soon as she touches it it bursts into sparks and the mysterious quality which allows her to interface with the staff feels a bit stronger. Also, there’s a faint smell of peppermint in the air.

Pretty! And apparently orthogonal to her native magic. The smell of peppermint reminds her to go check on her garden of Earth plants.

They're progressing steadily! Very green.

Excellent. She clears a bit more space and adds some apples and some maple seeds; maybe with how fast things grow here she'll be able to get maple syrup eventually.

As soon as she plants them, little saplings spring up. Looks like this place has very favorable growing conditions.

It really does! She looks forward to being able to get fruit and nuts without taking her wings off. And when another of those rabbits hops by, she finds herself saying, "If I hunt for food, only my prey need fear.", which solves her worries about the digestibility of local life-forms. The rabbit gets a talon through where a Terran rabbit would keep its brain.

It explodes! Most of it evaporates, but a decently sized fillet remains behind.

Once the initial explosion is out of the way, that's a lot nicer than having to deal with innards. She digs herself a fire pit and starts experimenting with getting a fire hot enough to cook the meat. If a torch can't be induced to burn hot enough, perhaps it can be induced to ignite some Earth-style tinder.

A campfire can be made out of ten wood and five torches! If she insists, though, she can light a fire with a block of wood and shavings of bark.

No, no, she'll go with the method that doesn't require sprouting bits and ripping them off. It still looks weird even if it doesn't feel like anything. She roasts the rabbit on a stick and eats it.

Tastes pretty good! Also, being near the campfire makes her feel kind of like she did when she ate the heart candy: warm, safe, and vaguely loved.

That's nice, except for how it reminds her that everyone who actually loves her probably thinks she's dead, and that she might as well be for all she has any way to see them again. 

But moping won't actually help, and the campfire is genuinely nice. She sits by it for a while after finishing the rabbit, then puts it out and goes mining again.

She encounters various veins of ore - copper, lead, tungsten, platinum - and three more heart crystals. There’s a few more skeletons, in the larger caverns. Then, she breaks through into a really big cavern.

There’s another little house at the bottom of it. 

Yum, tasty heart crystals! Houses are a weird thing to have as a naturally occurring landscape feature, except when you think about it they're not really any weirder than animate skeletons--they're both clearly copied from Earth minus vital context. What's this house look like?