Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-37863639-20190122144157/@comment-37863639-20190129131559

So, it looks like (at least for me) if you have completed a collection and have found items prior to a quest, and they DONT have a green plus sign next to them, the game gives you credit for finding them. My guess is that this happens because you can't go back and find these items again, and can't add them to your wishlist either, and therefor it would mess up the whole storyline. For example, I started a quest where I had multiple's of items but was missing the second one, and had not previously assembled the collection. I found the missing item and assembled the collection before the quest directed me to. This  meant I no longer had the first and second items to complete the quest in the correct order, so the game gave me "credit" for having already found the items, and triggered a chain reaction of "completed" pop-ups.