What an interesting material or family of materials! If they weathered down to this size, presumably these fragments can be broken apart?

What happens if she tries cutting a fragment in half repeatedly? Is there a minimum size she can make? What happens if she tries abrading a fragment instead of cutting it?

The material can be broken apart or abraded, and maintains its properties when that happens, except that it reverts into ordinary molecules once it's worn down to molecule size; they're all molecules she'd be able to find in nature, and mostly they're molecules she'd find in plants but ones she'd get from dirt or stone are also common.

Weeping Cherry vaguely feels like conducting experiments is supposed to make you less confused rather than more confused, but that's not actually how the world works.

If she takes a piece that just broke down into molecules, and tries to shove the two halves back together, does that make it go back to being crafting-material? She's not really expecting that to work, but if it does than it suggests that maybe she can figure out how to synthesize more.

Nope, that doesn't work, the molecules behave exactly like she'd expect any other molecules of their type to behave.

What happens if she takes two different shards of crafting material and smushes them together agglomerates them? (She's a scientist. She totally knows words like agglomerate and can use them in a case report.)

Does it matter whether she tries agglomerating shards with similar properties or not?

With rare exception they aren't really inclined to smoosh together into a single undifferentiated mass rather than remaining separate grains that happen to be closely adjacent, and would crumble if she tried. The few pieces she has that are soft enough for that without already having been worn away into molecules can be mixed to form a mass with properties in between its constituent parts, proportional to their masses.

Weeping Cherry spends a few minutes trying to think of other tests and skimming through the sand for more fragments. She tries wrapping her growing lump of softer material around one of the pieces of harder material, in case they'll assimilate given time.

While she's waiting for that, she goes through her forb's various diagnostic messages to see if they shine any more light on what happened. They don't, really, but she does see that automatic repairs are working, albeit slowly. Her forb should be completely repaired in a handful of weeks.

She could sit and wait quietly, but she's in another world with telepathic aliens. She tries seeing if she can get the crows to play tag.

She can get the crows to play tag! Or, mostly, anyway, they have a little bit of a tendency to lose track of who's it when they get too excited. They're definitely having fun, though!

She considers shining a laser pointer on whoever is it to help them keep track, but that sounds like an unneeded complication.

She's happy to play tag with the crows while doing little additional experiments as she thinks of them for as long as they'd like. In particular, she tries melting the fragments that don't have a constant temperature and seeing how the material behaves as a liquid, or whether this lets her combine harder fragments.

A few of the fragments soften when they're heated, but none of them seem willing to melt. Some of them combust, instead; this is mostly the ones that are  mimicking wood, but not all of them, and a fair portion of the bone-mimics and a few of the stone-mimics and others do, too. The smoke they make is made of mundane molecules, again mostly plant-based ones.

Huh! She's tempted to just keep pumping heat into the ones that aren't combusting to see how far she can push it, but probably that is a bad idea on an inhabited beach. She adds that to her todo list to check later.

Actually, how many crows are there playing tag with her? She's seen a lot of them, in the boats and so on, and she's not sure whether this is a normal density of crows. Maybe these crows are more social and/or have more plentiful food than Earthly crows? Or maybe she's just bad at estimating what a normal number of crows is.

There are about a dozen crows playing tag, and another few dozen around and above the lake. (One of the ones out on the boats is a little weird-looking, now that she's paying attention, bigger than the others and with a longer face and tail.) She does seem to have attracted a crowd of them, but it's a big lake, it seems plausible that the overall number is reasonable.

Weeping Cherry zooms in on the bigger one with the longer face and tail. Are those the only differences? It's possible this is a different (sub-)species, but it seems a bit odd that there would only be one out of dozens of crows.

...that's not a crow, that's a dinosaur. Or at least that's the impression - they have a snout rather than a beak, and their tail has a long bony base supporting the feathers, and there are fingers at the joints of their wings. They do seem to be a very crow-like dinosaur, though, and they're hanging around with a normal crow as if there's nothing unusual about that.

Weeping Cherry pauses for a moment, but only a moment. Finding alien dinosaurs on an alien world is in some ways less surprising than finding species that she can immediately analogize to crows. Is there a humanoid in the boat too, or is this maybe the dinosaur's boat?

Yep! There's actually two in that one, an adult and a child; the boat matches the adult's outfit and the child's clothes are a different set of colors.

Weeping Cherry will wait until there's a stopping point in the game, and then try to ask the crows about the dinosaur and any other local sentient species.

She draws five pictures: herself and some other crystals, a flock of crows, a group of local humanoids, the dinosaur, and then a question mark. If that doesn't provoke a response, she'll try putting those things in a circle and a few plants and rocks outside the circle and then pulsing the circle a little.

They don't know what to make of that! When she puts the group in a circle and rocks outside the circle one of the crows will venture that all of the creatures she's showing are thinking creatures, unlike dogs or chickens or whatever and definitely unlike plants and rocks.

She adds dogs and chickens outside the circle. Then she shows them an elephant on the border of the circle, and wobbles it in and out.

Mastodons are thinking creatures, so that probably is too, but they've never met one.

She continues playing this game with intelligent animals (octopi? dolphins? ravens?), just to make sure that she doesn't accidentally mistake something for being non-sentient.

These particular crows have never met an octopus or a dolphin; one of them thinks the dolphin looks a bit like the thinking-creature fish they heard about from a traveling Crafter once. Ravens are thinking creatures! So are parrots and prairie dogs!

Weeping Cherry tries a few more marginal guesses to try and find a lower bound. How about ants? Cockatiels? Rats? Spiders? Woodchucks?

They've never met a cockatiel; of the rest, only rats are thinking creatures.

Weeping cherry makes a note of all the things they categorize. If all of these species are telepathic, she probably doesn't have to worry too much about hurting something that can think without being made aware of it.

But it seems like the sort of thing where it's best to be sure. She adds all of the species they mentioned to her forb's sentient-being-noticing software, and bumps the safety factor up. The environmental controls, etc., are already tuned not to hurt even non-sentient animals, but in an emergency her forb will now prioritize the welfare of these animals on the same level as other humans, instead of on the same level as the scenery around her.

That done, she's not sure what to ask next. She wants to ask about what the crows like to do, and to eat, but she has the feeling that if she grabs some biomass from the edge of the beach and turns it into edible food that this will cause confusion and consternation.

She decides to see what other games they like. How do they feel about hide-and-seek?