I see, because I ate poorly I was too weak to fight Nero! I put the blame on Minerva for letting me eat ice cream every single night for supper. I had no clue that the item next to Minerva was interactive.
To show an item is something that should be checked out/interacted with, you could put an animated graphic over it like the little shine graphic that comes with RPG Maker (gotta use "stepping animation on" to make it 'sparkle'). This visually tells a player that this item in question can be used.
What difficulties did you have trying to get auto-run events to work? The premise of them is fairly straight forward luckily - set the event to auto-run (you can make them run under certain conditions by setting a switch, variable, etc on the upper left of the event menu), and whatever event you program into it will automatically go when the player enters the map. To prevent it from running more than once, at the very end of the event make it set its Self Switch to A or something, then add a new event page with Self Switch A selected in the upper left under event conditions.