Hello Selexa,
we hope you still had fun playing Avani despite the issue that you described. We appreciate that you took your time to give us feedback :).
There are two types of skill nodes. Categories and the ones that you need to craft recipes like the campfire. When you craft something you gain skillpoints for the category the recipe is part of. When you want to learn a new recipe you can only use the earned skillpoints in that category and not from different categories. Often you will not be able to learn a recipe completely but just put like one point into it. As soon as you did that you can go to the crafting menu and select the recipe that you spent a point into it. You can now try to guess the remaining ingredients by dragging them into the red questionmark area.
We get that this might be confusing but we are trying our best to improve upon the tutorial to make this easier to understand.
If you're unable to learn a recipe despite having skill points in the category the recipe is part of then the reason for that is, that a different recipe needs to be learned first. There is no message (yet!) that tells you this. It will just obstruct you from learning the recipe.
Sorry, if that caused the confusing!
The red number on a recipe indeed tells you the amount of missing skill points/ingredients.
We hope you still enjoyed Avani and we could help with the confusion :) Feel free to join our discord to chat with us directly and have a great day!