"I will definitely stay away from bleeding or screaming trees! That sounds awful!" And increases P(he somehow got dosed with LSD and is now totally losing his shit on the floor of the Stata Center), assuming what he recalls of classmates' stories is accurate. "Is this house strong enough to keep out monsters?" He much prefers the "hide" strategy to the "make weapons and fight monsters" strategy, because he is not every possible flavor of nuts.

{is strong enough to keep out all monsters in forest!}

"Oh good. Hmm, you mentioned making a torch out of slime, and you mentioned monsters called slimes, do slimes by any chance leave slime around where I can find some?"

{can make torch from gel, gel comes from slime. have to fight slime but slime is not very hard to fight.}

"Ooookay. And they're not people, right, they can't talk or make deals or anything?"

{slime can't talk,} it confirms. {slime only move and bounce and hit things.}

"Alright. So it's probably okay to fight it unless I turn out to be really bad at fighting. Which I probably will." Hey, hang on a minute, he has a floor-roof on top of this building and does not yet have a torch. Why isn't it pitch dark in here?

For one thing, he left the door open. For another, the ambient light is oddly bright in here; even in the farthest corners of the room, there's enough light to avoid bumping into walls.

If wood is weird, maybe air and light are too. He should replicate Newton's experiments on refraction. He should replicate everything. He should get a goddamn pencil and paper and write down his experiment list. "By the way," he says as he opens the door and looks out, "do you know a recipe for pencils and paper?" He doesn't have much hope, because he would expect paper to be all wood, but maybe he can make a fire and get charcoal and write on his walls.

The forest spirit sways thoughtfully. {don't know... maybe ask water spirit, water spirit knows how to make lots of things.}

Hopefully the water spirit will know, since otherwise he's going to need to make charcoal with his torch, near his wooden house, in a forest. "Okay. I'm going to go look for slimes." He pokes his head out the door.

The forest is unnaturally quiet, but then, this forest usually is.

A round blob of what appears to be animate green Jello, totally devoid of any limbs or features, hops merrily between the trees. It's about a foot wide and looks pretty darn harmless.

Oh no, it's cute! Fuuuck, he's probably going to have to give up veganism while he's living in the weird nonsense wilderness, isn't he. Well, he'll cross that bridge when he comes to it. Maybe he can get slime out of this thing without injuring it. He walks cautiously toward it, wood-armored hands outstretched. 

Hop hop hop.

It's pretty easy to catch, but as soon as he grabs it it starts aggressively trying to wiggle free.

He would too if he was it. Can he scrape some goo off, or squeeze some goo out, or otherwise end up with goo on his hands? (His goal when handling animals is usually closer to the opposite of this. Heh.)

Goo can definitely be separated from the creature, but not in any format that yields a recipe list—

—and then it manages to launch itself at his face, tearing itself in half in the process, and being torn in half appears to kill it, and there is quite a lot of goo all over him but three little rubbery item-balls among the mess.

(The goo tastes... like very faintly grass-flavoured Jell-O. It's not exactly a gourmet sensation but isn't particularly unpleasant either.)

That was neither the expected nor the desired outcome! Bruce expresses this sentiment eloquently as "Yarrrgh!" and barely avoids falling over. Once stable, he wipes off his armor as best he can and collects his item balls. He also spits out the bit that got in his mouth, and then spits a few more times, because he's not eating alien jello even if it doesn't taste poisonous.

With {1 wood} and {1 gel}, he can make something which he may safely presume will be a torch!

Torch: get! Safely away from any trees or walls, and not wearing his wooden armor, since he doesn't know if the mini form can catch things on fire.

The mini form has a little stylized flame that is not in any relevant sense made of fire.

He can place the torch attached to a wall at an angle, or attached to the ground standing straight up.

Okay, putting a torch on a wall is probably fine, but he's going to place that thin wall he didn't end up using in his house and try sticking the torch to that first, so he can experiment on it in relative safety and without worrying about smoke in his room.

Facts about placed torches:

It generates approximately no heat.

Objects touching the flame do not catch fire.

The torch does not burn down.

The artistic curl of smoke rising from the flame has a pleasant woodsmoke-y smell but refuses to fill an enclosed space no matter how it is encouraged; he can enclose the torch fully inside a cube of walls, wait as long as he likes, and when he checks on it there will be the same little wisp of smoke curling upward from the end of the torch and none gathered in the rest of the space.

Bruce tries sticking lots of different things in the torch, starting with bits of grass and ending after the encouraging earlier results with his finger and the edge of his sleeve. He concludes that it does not work at all like real fire and in fact works a lot more conveniently. He moves it to an inside wall of his one-room house, which should really have a separate bathroom and bedroom at some point, and informs the forest spirit that "Torches are so neat!"

{is pretty!} says the spirit, bouncing happily.

"That too!" he says agreeably, then tries drinking the bathtub water. The existence of a bathtub recipe but no toilet recipe is interesting. It's like something in the whole setup is aware of humans, but not in the way a human would be.