Factorio: Space Age expansion has been released | Hacker News Reader

Factorio: Space Age expansion has been released

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58 pointsivanjermakov5 comments

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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.

I believe he built it almost entirely solo as well, a monumental effort that brought me personally hundreds of hours of joy in a single play through.

This post (https://www.patreon.com/posts/im-factorio-now-47218319) from him previously was an interesting look into life as a mod developer while outside the development cycle of the company!

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..

I am so hyped for this!

https://factorio.com/blog/post/factorio-space-age-release if you wanted to read from the developers.

It's been so long since I played without mods that I'm looking forward to a "simple" playthrough.

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!

If I hadn't already taken so much PTO this year, I probably would have taken today off just to play this.

It's gonna be a loooooong work day.

BTW, while Factorio (and its expansion) will likely never go on sale, if you're a Humble Choice subscriber, you can still get 20% off. https://www.humblebundle.com/store/factorio-space-age

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