Find The Needle — the launch guide: hay, money and the twenty orders

Find The Needle is a first-person automation game built on the most absurd premise in the genre: you wake in a warehouse in front of a haystack of roughly six million strands, holding a shovel and a metal detector, and the only instruction is to find the needles inside it. You dig by hand, you sell the hay, and you spend the money on belts and machines until nothing is done by hand any more.

It left demo behind and entered Early Access on 6 November 2026, and it arrives with an unusually strong tailwind: the demo climbed to #1 most-played demo on Steam worldwide in September 2026 — a claim the developer posted four times over two weeks as it went Top 10 → Top 5 → Top 3 → #1. It also arrives with no Steam guides at all — the community guide listing is empty — which is why this page exists on day one.

The short version

What the game actually is

The store page sells it as factory building, and it is, but the shape is unusual in one specific way: the haystack is finite and single. One pile lasts an entire run, all the way to the ending. You are not farming an infinite field — you are consuming a fixed mountain, which makes the machines you buy a bet on how much pile is left.

The loop has four beats, and the money beat is the one that changed most at launch:

1. Dig. Metal detector to find needles, hand tools to clear hay. The hand tools are a real upgrade ladder, not a tutorial formality: shovel, bucket, wheelbarrow, pitchfork, vacuum.
2. Process. Raw hay is worth little. Bales, Straw Panels, briquettes, pulp, paper and pellets are worth more, and each stage of processing is a machine and a power draw.
3. Sell. The selling stand has today's prices on a chalkboard, with charts — and buyers respond to volume. Sell too much of one product and its price drops; spread out across products and the money keeps coming.
4. Buy. Machines and upgrades. At launch most buildings cost parts as well as money, so the first thing a new machine needs is often a Fabricator, not cash.

Two systems run across all four beats and are the reason the game has depth beyond "more belts":

• The 24 needles. Each needle grants a bonus that reaches every machine — global multipliers, not local ones. Three of them are named in the launch notes: Big Depot, Deep Well and Fired Up. Finding needles is the win condition and the power curve.
• Metal in the hay. The pile is full of horseshoes, copper elbows and over twenty kinds of iron and copper scrap. Scrap rides your belts, sorts, and sells — but let it ride into a hay machine and it jams, so sorting is not optional once the pile gets deep.

The five stages and the twenty orders

The demo had seven orders. The full game has twenty, in five stages, and each stage ends with a big customer whose signature opens the next stage. This is the progression spine — there is no "level", only the next order.

Two rules about those orders matter more than the list:

• Signing an order hands you everything it opens, with a reveal animation — so the reward for a stage is the next tier of machines, not cash.
• A big order waits until your cabinet holds enough needles. The hunt and the factory pull on each other: you cannot out-build your needle count and skip the searching. That is the design's best idea and the reason the game is not just Factorio with grass.

The new products the stages unlock, in the developer's own list: Straw Panels, Reinforced Panels, Hay Rods, Gear Sets, Wire Spools, Motors, Paper Rolls, Packed Cartons, Sugar Sacks, Bioplastic Sheets, White Fibre, Carbon Booms and Composite Plates.

The first hour, in order

This part is deliberately conservative: the developer has not published prices, order requirements or tech-tree costs, so below is what the launch build offers and the order the systems imply, not a fake shopping list.

1. Metal detector first, shovel second. The detector is how needles are found before machines exist, and needles are global bonuses. Digging without one is clearing hay, not hunting.
2. Sell at the stand, and read the chalkboard. Prices are per-product and visible, with charts. Selling 50 times in a row is an achievement (On a Roll, 61% of players) — the game expects the manual phase to be a real grind.
3. Buy hand tools before machines, but not many. Bucket, wheelbarrow and pitchfork each raise what one trip yields. The vacuum is the hand-phase ceiling; once you own it, hand digging has a proper throughput.
4. Power before automation. Place a pole, wire the network, and learn the POWER tab on the first generator you own — it graphs what each line made and wanted, and names why a line is short. Every machine panel shows whether it is running and how much power it draws.
5. Build the first belt into the sell stand. This is the step that converts the manual loop into an automated one; from there the game is belts, splitters and processing machines.
6. Sort scrap early. The first time metal reaches a hay machine the line jams, a banner tells you, and the machine glows so you can find it. A splitter with a scrap route costs less than the jam it prevents.
7. Bale, then press. Bales come before panels in the tech list, and the Panel Press squeezes four bales into one Straw Panel — the game's first real multiplication. Wrapped bales and the Smelter follow.
8. Only then scale. Fabricator, Assembler, Sugar Cooker, Bioplastic Reactor, Fibre Spinner, Carbon Kiln, Biogas Digester. Each is a stage gate; none is optional.

Money: prices fall when you oversell

This is the single mechanic most likely to be misplayed by someone arriving from Factorio, where you sell infinite goods at a fixed rate.

• Buyers respond to volume. Sell too much of one product and its price drops. The fix is breadth: a second and third product line, not a bigger line.
• Today's prices are on the chalkboard by the selling stand, with charts — so the game is telling you when to switch, and the stand itself can be moved, which matters in a warehouse you keep rebuilding.
• Tuning cards are a separate upgrade track: sixteen endless upgrades for machines and power, so there is a money sink that never finishes.
• Buildings cost parts as well as money at launch. A Fabricator making parts is often the real bottleneck on expansion, not the bank balance.

Metal in the hay

The scrap system is what turns a hay-processing factory into a sorting factory, and it is new at launch:

• Scrap comes in over twenty kinds of iron and copper, plus oddities like horseshoes and copper elbows.
• It rides belts, sorts, and sells — and it jams hay machines if it arrives unsorted.
• The scanner has a scrap cannon, aimed from its drawer, so the searching machine can also shoot scrap out of its own line.
• The Smelter melts scrap into iron and copper ingots, which still glow while riding belts. Ingots feed the Fabricator (parts from ingots and bricks) and the Assembler (parts into bigger parts, and packing pet hay cartons).
• Generators burn scrap instead of jamming on it — a genuinely useful sink for the low-value scrap stream.

Power, water and lifts: the three utilities

Power. Poles have reach that now counts height, so cables climb. Every generator and pole has a POWER tab with a per-line graph; SHOW POWER LINE lights up everything on one line and labels the machines. The PRIORITY tab is the important one: set each machine to FIRST, NORMAL or LAST, and when power runs short, LAST goes off first. That single setting is how you keep the line that feeds an order alive while decorative machines brown out. Generators warn you while fuel is low rather than after, and a short power cut no longer dries out a whole pump chain.

Water. Water is measured in litres a minute, and every machine states its need. The lift rules are exact: a well pushes water 10 m up, a Pipe Pump Mk.1 lifts it 20 m higher and Mk.2 50 m. A machine above that range says it is dry and how far out of reach it is, and the pipe view rings where the water stops climbing. Valves cap flow, the four-way Water Cross splits a main, and a machine without water glows blue.

Lifts. Hay Lifts move goods vertically, snap to a wall's belt port or to a belt end in the air, and go straight through a platform. The compact 2 m Hay Lift fits platforms either way round and can sit on a door or hang from it.

Overclocking, and what needles in a socket do

• Every machine runs between 1% and 100%, set by you — so idle machines can be turned down rather than left drawing power at full rate.
• Needle Sockets push a machine past 100%. Needles are the global bonus currency; a socket spends that power locally, which is the one real trade-off in the needle economy.
• Machine panels show Tuning and Quality, and an UPGRADE tab shows the current and next model side by side before you commit.

Build tools that save hours later

• Blueprints, in three sizes: lay out a setup on the Blueprint Designer, save it, and place copies anywhere. They build piece by piece, connect themselves, and come down in one go.
• Dismantle Mode on the Needle Hammer shows the refund before you swing, and marks up to 50 buildings at once.
• Splitter routes: up to eight named, coloured routes. Put splitters in a route and switch the whole route ON or OFF from the ROUTES page or from any splitter in it — and routes can be set to flip together, so opening one closes another. This is how you build a switchable scrap line without re-plumbing.
• Belts: underground belts that chain, belt poles at any height, belt hangers, and a belt meter showing flow.
• Hold to place: press H to hold a piece and nudge it with the arrow keys.

The two diggers are the automation endgame: the Hay Excavator takes a marked dig zone and chews into the pile one wad at a time onto your belt (waiting when the belt is full), and the Skyline Crane is the ultimate digger — set a zone, or take the controls and drive it.

Where players actually stop

The achievement percentages on day one are the most useful data on the store page, because they include the demo audience:

Read it as a funnel: nearly everyone digs, fewer than half make a bale, and only one in six reaches metal. The manual phase — not the factory — is where this game loses people, which is the strongest argument for spending your first money on throughput tools and a belt to the sell stand rather than on processing machines you cannot feed.

Pile sizes, sandbox and the ending

• Six pile sizes, from SMALL (Easy) to MOUNT HAYVEREST (Impossible). The title screen states how hard each pile is, so the difficulty choice is at save creation, not buried in a menu.
• Sandbox unlocks everything and makes building free, with tools on F1. Sandbox runs stay off the leaderboards.
• Leaderboards carry a run sheet for every game: a graph and a timeline of how that run went.
• The ending is the 24 needles. The developer says only: find them all and the 24th "finally opens something". Finishing the last order unlocks a Bubba Statue in every subsequent run.

What this page does not know

Named, because this is a launch-day page on an Early Access game with an empty guide listing:

1. Order requirements. What each of the 20 orders asks for, in what quantity, is not published anywhere — the changelog names the customers, not the bills.
2. Prices. No tool, machine or product price is documented. The demo-era guide sites circulating quote figures like an $800 first belt and a $500 shovel tier, none of which comes from the developer, and launch re-costed most buildings to include parts — so those numbers are unreliable at best.
3. Tech-tree costs. 300+ upgrades, zero published costs.
4. Needle locations, and whether needles respawn or move between runs.
5. What the ending actually is. The store page says "who knows" and the changelog says it will not say.
6. Throughput numbers — belt speed, machine cycle times, litres-per-minute for individual machines.
7. Multiplayer, which is planned but has no date beyond "within 6–12 months of updates".

How this page was made, and what it does not claim

This is a compiled guide, not a played-through walkthrough. It was written on 6 November 2026, the day the game entered Early Access, from three sources only: the full Early Access launch changelog (the developer's own 12,000-character list of every new stage, machine, utility and quality-of-life change), the Steam store page, and the game's achievement ladder and global completion percentages — which is where the funnel table comes from. Every number on this page traces to one of those three.

The site's rule is that a page names its sources and its gaps. This one has not been. It is written to be useful anyway on the parts the developer documented — the stage spine, the money rule, the scrap jam, the exact pump heights, the priority system — and it names seven gaps rather than filling them with the numbers the demo-era guide sites invented. If you are playing it, the in-game panels are the authority, and a single confirmed price cancels a paragraph of guesswork.

One warning worth repeating from the changelog: the demo's old names are gone. The Pelletizer is now the Hay Bricketizer, and the old belt splitter and joiner are the Y Splitter and Y Joiner. Any demo-era guide or video using those names is describing a build that no longer exists — and none of them carry over to your save.