This expansion is heavily influenced by a modder named Earendel, who was so good that the devs hired him.
This strikes me as an excellent recruitment pattern:
1. Make your product moddable/programmable/expandable
2. Let the enthusiasts go nuts producing amateur content/extensions/plugins
3. Hire the best of them
Candidates are qualified by their demonstrable experience, come with a built-in knowledge of your codebase/API, and the job interview can focus on the human aspects of employment rather than doing the usual extremely poor job of assessing technical skills.
This game as a whole has brought me the most joy of most likely any game I've played since childhood, and has been especially valuable to me as a career software engineer facing resource constraints and probems that I can actually solve after a day of banging my head against a keyboard..
Factorio has got to be one of the best games of all time in my book, and it actually teaches a lot about software engineering, optimization, finding & fixing bottlenecks and dealing with legacy code.
Space Age introduces four new planets for the player to build on, space platforms acting as transportation between platforms and a quality mechanic which lets the player build better items by investing more resources into constructing items. We also finally get to play around with elevated rails!
This strikes me as an excellent recruitment pattern:
1. Make your product moddable/programmable/expandable
2. Let the enthusiasts go nuts producing amateur content/extensions/plugins
3. Hire the best of them
Candidates are qualified by their demonstrable experience, come with a built-in knowledge of your codebase/API, and the job interview can focus on the human aspects of employment rather than doing the usual extremely poor job of assessing technical skills.