Hi, thanks for playing the game!! And don't worry about asking questions.
1) With the action Search, Forage and Visit, you have the opportunity to roll for materials or artifacts. If you want to, you can spend your remaining Action Point to increase the number of materials or artifacts. For example, for Forage, you roll 1d6 to determine the number of gathered materials. When you spend your two remaining APs all on this, you roll 1d6+2 instead.
2) You can forage without exploring any location. I imagine the location you're exploring are special locations that have human artifacts, but you can forage anywhere! You also don't have to visit an NPC to accept a request or report to them. At least, mechanically, you don't have to spend any AP to do the Explore and Visit move. You could RP however you want though!