It bobs affirmatively. {is good. gives health.}

"It would fix my wounds?"

Affirmative bob. {fix, and harder to hurt next time!}

"Ooh. Is there anything else, anything safer, I could do to fix my wounds in the meantime?"

{can make campfire with wood and gel. sit by campfire, get better.}

She has wood and gel! She makes a campfire and sets it down on a random furniture-less spot. 

Its cozy radiance causes her bruises and cuts to heal with visible speed. At this rate she'll probably be fine in a couple of minutes.

Ooh. She curls up by the cozy fire. 

"...Does this do anything for old injuries or scars?"

{not sure,} says the forest spirit. {maybe, maybe not.}

"Wilbur--"

Wilbur comes to sit by the fire, paying special attention to the intense scarring on his hip.

If there's an effect, it's subtle enough not to be immediately noticeable. Everything feels more comfortable and cozy, but it's hard to say whether the scars feel especially cozier than usual.

"No perceptible effect."

"Darn. Oh well." To the spirit: "Is there a way to make a bucket or something to hold tasty goo?"

{can make bucket with metal! can make metal from ore. first get stone, make furnace.}

"How do I get stone?" 

{stone is type of ground! can dig in ground with pickaxe.}

She identifies the wooden pickaxe. "I'm going to take this and go dig somewhere, okay?" she asks Wilbur. 

"Have fun," he says agreeably. 

She heads off in the opposite direction from the snowy hill. 

Opposite the snowy hill, there is a bunch more forest and then a desert!

The desert landscape is a grid-aligned patchwork of loose sand and hard flat sandstone. The sand seems unconstrained by the strictures of the grid, but the sandstone comes in the familiar cubes and half-cubes, and the picture they make together is more than a little surreal.

Here and there, the gentle sandy slopes are interrupted by an unnaturally regular cactus. They seem to be the local equivalent of trees, growing tall and cylindrical with neat rows of pointy spines and pleasingly balanced arrangements of arms.

...She pokes at the sand with the pickaxe. 

The pickaxe interacts with the sand exactly as one might expect.

She warily approaches a cactus, and tries very hard to wrap a tentacle around it without impaling herself too badly on the prickles.

She can successfully uproot the cactus in this fashion. Do cacti even have roots? Regardless, once it is reduced to Tiny Item format, it's not prickly anymore.

Interestingly, instead of the cacti dropping seeds, it seems that any old cylinder of cactus can be planted on sand or sandstone as a wee cactusling, presumably to grow up into a full-size cactus from there.