Processing a Haystack of Over 13 Million Straws in an Automated Factory to Find 6 Needles: A Find The Needle Demo Playthrough

According to the display in the upper right of the screen, the haystack to be processed this time contains about 13 million straws (13,686,784 according to the video title). There is a straw buyer inside the building, so at first the player carries straws out by hand one at a time and brings them to the buyer. This earns $0.02.

At the tool shop, a small shovel can be bought for $0.25, so the first goal is to purchase it. However, even after saving up the money, it couldn't be bought right away. It turned out that the shovel first had to be unlocked in the tech tree for $1. The commentator kept carrying straw by hand until they had saved another $1, unlocked it, and then paid the item price to get the shovel.

With the shovel, 18 straws could be scooped up in a single action, and earnings reportedly rose to about $20 per minute. After that, the tools were upgraded one after another. The next tool could scoop 54 straws in one swing, and then a pitchfork was purchased.

After tools came containers for holding the scooped straw. The first was a bucket that holds 600 straws. The player scoops straw into the bucket, and once it's full, lifts the bucket, carries it to the buyer, and pours the contents into a bag. This considerably reduces the number of round trips to the buyer.

The wheelbarrow unlocked next holds more than 2,000 straws. Once it's full, the player pushes it to the buyer and tips it to pour the straw into the bag. By this point, about 80,000 straws had been processed. With 13.6 million still remaining, the commentator decided that doing it by human power alone was getting tough.

The next unlock was the conveyor belt. A conveyor was run from the buyer's delivery slot and connected so that it circled all the way around the haystack. Now, whenever the pile was knocked down, the straw would fall onto the conveyor and flow to the buyer.

Next, power-related technologies were unlocked, providing generators, power poles, and conveyor T-junctions, as well as a machine that compresses straw (the compressor). Running the compressor also requires a power facility, so it takes up quite a lot of space. The commentator temporarily removed the existing conveyor, placed the compressor, and set up a generator next to it. Since both the generator and the compressor are machines that run on straw received via conveyor, the conveyor input was split using a T-junction.

The compressed straw coming out of the compressor is carried to the buyer by conveyor. Anticipating shipping to destinations other than the buyer in the future, a T-junction was also placed on the output side, set for now to send everything only to the buyer. Finally, power poles were erected to deliver electricity, and from then on, every time straw was fed in, compressed blocks were carried out.

The game has delivery quests. The quest at this stage was to deliver 20 compressed blocks to unlock a blueprint. The commentator extended the conveyor that had been split off in advance and connected it to a delivery truck separate from the buyer. After switching the splitter setting and delivering 20 blocks, the quest was completed, and the truck drove off to ship the products somewhere.

Next, the bale wrapper was unlocked. It's a machine that wraps compressed bales, and it was introduced by replacing the conveyor on the compressor's output side. Now wrapped bales, which sell for more, began coming out. The bale wrapper also had a delivery quest; by switching the splitter setting to send the required number to a separate lane, a new blueprint was obtained.

Up to this point, the haystack had been knocked down by hand, but from here the commentator set about full automation. The existing facilities were dismantled, and money was paid to expand the warehouse space. Then the commentator unlocked an electric arm that digs into the haystack and a scanner that detects needles on the conveyor.

The arm automatically places nearby straw onto the conveyor, but if a needle is mixed in, it sends that along too. So a scanner needs to be inserted to make sure needles aren't lost. According to the commentator, in the manual era you could visually check whether a needle was there, so a scanner wasn't necessary. Once digging is automated, a scanner becomes necessary.

From this stage on, every piece of equipment needs power, so the power facility was rebuilt first. If you put a small amount of straw into a generator to start it up (bootstrapping), it keeps generating power until there is no more straw to feed it. This time the power facility was built in a separate location, so several power poles were erected to transmit electricity to near the buyer, and the processing equipment was rebuilt with that power. With this, full automation was achieved.

Now that everything was automated, simply waiting would have been fine, but the commentator went on to introduce new machines in pursuit of more expensive products. The first was the pelletizer. This machine is designed to eject products toward the front left, so it was placed slightly offset at an angle, a conveyor was laid where the products land, and the ejection distance was adjusted. The commentator remarked that it is more difficult than previous machines because it is designed not to stop even when the output is blocked. The replacement went smoothly, and the ejected products were carried correctly.

The next delivery quest yielded the blueprint for the disc press. This machine requires two inputs, "bricks" and straw, and the commentator sees it as something like an advanced challenge building on the pelletizer. You just feed the pelletizer's output into one input and raw straw into the other. The commentator noted that the complexity of the machines gradually increases as the game progresses, and praised the delivery system for guiding the player well.

The pulper, unlocked next, is a device that mixes straw and water to make pulp boards. It was connected so that straw goes in and pulp boards come out, and for water, a well pump that draws it up from underground was introduced, with water piped in. Because it handles liquids, it looked difficult at first glance, but once actually installed, it turned out to be surprisingly simple.

The final quest unlocked the paper machine, which makes paper rolls from pulp boards. It has a simple mechanism where you just feed in three pulp boards, so all it took was connecting the paper machine after the existing machines. The paper machine was placed in space that had been left open in advance, and when pulp board production resumed, it started running. With this, all the processing machines available in the demo were in place, and delivering paper rolls completed all the quests.

At this point, 1 million straws had been processed, with 12 million still remaining. To prepare for further expansion, the commentator expanded the workspace to its maximum level and, judging that turning straw into paper rolls seemed most cost-efficient, decided to build 7 paper machines. The existing equipment was removed, and 7 paper machine lanes were lined up in parallel. The space-consuming well pumps were placed on top of the machines, and reportedly they still drew up water even though they weren't installed on the ground.

After the expansion, earnings reached $10,000 per minute. Additional generators were built to supply the large amount of power, and these also consumed quite a lot of straw. All that was left was to wait for the straw to dwindle, and the commentator said that in automation games, there's a kind of catharsis the moment you no longer have to do anything.

Just as the game's original purpose was nearly forgotten, a needle finally got caught by the scanner. It was the first find after processing about 3 million straws. It was stored in a dedicated display shelf prepared in advance. According to the commentator, the game has 24 types of needles, and 6 of them appear in the currently available demo. That means 5 more were still lying hidden in the straw.

Another scanner had also lit up, so upon checking, a sewing needle was found as the second needle. Each needle seems to come with a special effect, but the commentator said that since all that's left is to watch the automated factory, the effects no longer seem to mean much. Then the scanner lit up again, and two needles had been found at once. At this point, 2.76 million straws remained, and the pile had gotten considerably smaller.

When the remainder approached 2 million, another one was found, leaving just 1 still undiscovered. A few minutes later, the scanner reacted, and the last needle was collected as well.

With all the needles collected, the original goal was achieved, but the commentator decided to clear away the remaining straw as well. After watching the arms work for a while, the remaining count reached 0 and the haystack was gone. Approaching the spot where the pile had been revealed a mysterious manhole leading underground. The commentator speculated that in the full version, it might lead to an underground world.

Finally, the now-unneeded factory complex was removed all at once, and the playthrough ended with all 13 million straws processed and 6 needles found. Looking back, the commentator said that the progression from manual work through tool upgrades to automation was surprisingly fun, and that finding a needle brought an indescribable sense of accomplishment. They rated it as a small-scale game that was nonetheless thoroughly enjoyable, and expressed anticipation for the future release of the game, which is still at the demo stage.