Hi, I'm hoping someone can take me by the hand, or tell me if I've messed something up bad or experiencing some kind of error. I've been struggling with thaumcraft and it just doesn't seem like the instructions in the wiki match what is happening.
So I started with wandering about gathering aspects by looking at stuff through the thaumometer. Then I futzed around and researched some compound aspects on the table by combining the basic ones together.
I'm experiencing two problems:
1) I am having huge problems gathering more aspects. I know that this is partly because I've looked at a lot of things, but some things I never looked at and don't seem to be able to. I've tried, for example, pulling a water shard out of a chest specifically to look at with the thaumometer. I definitely had not done so before. I dropped it on the ground with 'Q' and looked at it, but didn't get any aqua aspect. However, I specifically went and looked at a chicken and got air aspect from that, so it's not like the whole thing is borked.
Is there a different way to look at things that you can't place on the world like a block? Did I do it wrong?
2) I have tried following the instructions for getting research points a billion times and can't seem to figure out what I'm doing wrong. I click on things in the thaumomicon, and it doesn't take ink and paper out of my inventory or do anything. I have a pair of scribe tools, ink sacs, and paper in my inventory, but when I click on one of the flashing icons in the thaumomicon it just says I don't have the necessary aspects to unlock it. I can't get the paper with the hexagons to show up on the alchemist table. Any tips?
I feel like I must be missing some really straightforward stuff, and I'm kicking myself because I wasted a lot of gathered aspects by experimenting randomly instead of looking for the recipes and making the compound aspects directly, but it seems like I should be able to get further than this?