"Oh good. Where do the night monsters go during the daytime? Is there a risk of running across a sleeping one? Either in the cave or up here."

{in daytime, night monsters not!}

"Somehow I kind of expected that. I'd probably be angry too, if I popped in and out of existence every 24 hours. Hey, wait, does that mean if someone kills a monster they'll just start existing again the next night?"

The forest spirit, somehow, looks deeply thoughtful.

{don't know if same monster... but don't know if same monster anyway,} it muses. {is night monster on different night same one, or different? don't know!}

"Yeah . . . Void, I wish I had the guts to try to communicate with them! Or any clue how, with space aliens I would do prime numbers but I worry skeletons aren't in a position to learn much math."

Doubtful forest noises. {could talk to special monster, maybe... but special monster very scary.}

"Why would I be more able to talk to them, if they're more dangerous?"

{some special monster can talk words!}

"Ooh, neat! Do you think they'll know things about other monsters, like whether they come back if they die and stuff?"

{maybe! other spirit might know too. stone spirit knows things about monsters.}

"Nice. In that case I think I'll spend today experimenting with armor and go down there first thing tomorrow morning so I don't lose track of time and end up staying down past nightfall." He has enough tin now to replace this armor, right? Because he wants to bash it and his wooden armor to bits with various tools and see how strong they each are.

He totally has enough tin for that! He also has enough tin to try the 2-metal handcrafting recipe, which turns out to yield a Short Sword. That might be useful for armor-testing purposes.

Yes it is! Does chopping up wooden armor and then tin armor with a tin sword ruin the sword?

It super does not, actually!

The wooden armor goes down noticeably faster than the tin, and also when he whacks one half of a pair of gauntlets or greaves into a nonfunctional state the other one crumbles to match, and if he re-itemizes the resulting wreckage once his experiments are complete he gets e.g. a {broken wooden helmet}.

...also, if he hangs around his Refined Crafting Table after itemizing all those broken things, he might notice a recipe that calls for 1 wood, 1 glass, 1 metal, and 10 broken items.

The symmetrical destruction is bizzare and amazing and yet another reminder that the degree to which anything here is made out of atoms is highly questionable. Also, he gets to make a Garbage Thing! What is the Garbage Thing?

The Garbage Thing is... a Tinker's Table! The Tinker's Table will accept arbitrary quantities of arbitrary materials for an unclear purpose, with an interface more reminiscent of the furnace than of a standard crafting recipe.

Hmm. He gives it any more broken stuff he still has, and a piece of wood and a date.

The Tinker's Table absorbs all these things without an outward trace, possibly by magic or possibly into one of its rather excessive number of cute little drawers.

And, once it contains both a piece of wood and a few pieces of extra experimentally-broken wooden armour, it offers him something much more like the crafting interface: a selection of all those broken wooden things, each of which can be repaired for... {1 tinkering wood}? Of which the table apparently contains 10. If he examines its abstract interface more closely he may also be able to tell that it additionally contains {10 tinkering dates}, but those are presumably not useful for repairing any of the broken stuff he gave it.

Ooh, this is neat. Very environmentally friendly. He fixes the wooden helmet, as a proof of concept, then tries to get as much as possible of his wooden armor back. Some of it got used to make the table in the first place, and that's probably a write-off, but maybe he'll be able to end up with a full set again more cheaply than by starting over entirely.

He can totally do that! Each piece of wooden armor takes 1 tinkering wood to repair, and the table turns every piece of wood he gives it into 10 tinkering wood. Repairing a broken set of armor is therefore definitely cheaper than making a whole new one.

That's so aesthetic! And he can get his tin armor back too! So now he has tin armor and a tin sword and also another question for the forest spirit. "What other metals are there? Are they sorted by geography like the trees?"

{metals is lead tin iron copper silver gold platinum! better ones lower down.}

"What does better mean? I'm used to different metals being better for different things."

{not sure. water spirit might know, because crafting! or cloud spirit might know because magic? i think some metal is magic.}

"Okay, cool. I think I have time to try to get some ink from the shadow forest today." He would kind of rather put it off because he doesn't want to fight another monster, but also he can't just procrastinate indefinitely. He puts on his tin armor, grabs his sword and a bucket for the ink, idly wonders if he has a recipe for a scabbard somewhere or if the ability to tinymode things made whatever comes up with recipes decide he didn't need one, chides himself for anthropomorphizing, eats some apples, and heads out. Maybe he can get in and out with some ink without seeing a monster, if he's fast enough.