It'll automatically try to craft any parts that it needs and is aware of (Export Buses can be taught to do something similar)Do I have to make the circuits before hand, or will the advanced circuit recipe take care of that?
Hmm.
I guess my last question is: For patterns, how can I can craft say for example... An advanced circuit? Can it use the pattern for the circuit, or does it build a circuit using the circuit pattern, then build the advanced circuit with a pattern that specifies a circuit?
I don't think I'll have a problem creating 2-4 64k discs.
No, drives last forever. It's a coding thing (specifically, to avoid using multiple item IDs for similar items, it uses NBT data to distinguish between different drive types and whether a specific drive is formatted/full).Lastly, on the drives there seems to be a number xxxx : x after the "64k ME Drive". What are those? Do drives deteriorate? Even if it's small, I want to be aware of this as well.
It's mostly a safety factor matter. Bad Things can happen the storage system attached to a nuclear reactor acts unexpectedly.You also mentioned a separate network for nuke stuff. I don't do nukes, so I really don't know particulars about that. But I have no idea why you'd want to separate your nuke stuff from your main stuff.
One annoying thing about AE is power. If you lose power, you lose all your mats. I had an engine explosion and it took out just enough power that AE wasn't working. So I had to remove the auto-crafter (which takes a lot of power), just so I could access the rest of my mats. But in order to make another engine, I had to make everything manually, which was really annoying considering I used to just click on a gear or piston and it would come to me.
As for what you mention (dusts appearing and disappearing), you won't notice it. The AE interface is sorted by number of items. You'll likely have many more iron ingots than iron dust, so you won't even see when iron dust enters your system.
Another thing (and this is for down the road), is the export buses do not like when it is set to auto-craft everything that comes into it. It clogs up the system and the crafting monitor doesn't tell you what is wrong. So I just make a bunch of stuff ahead of time and have the export bus export the already made items. E.g., my fermenter receives fertilizer. But if I set it to autocraft fertilizer from the apatite in the system, it doesn't work. So I make 10 stacks of fertilizer at a time, and make more if needed.