Find The Needle takes the oldest idiom about pointless searching and builds a whole game around it. You wake up in a locked warehouse, face a haystack of roughly six million strands, and dig. Then you sell what you dig. Then you buy machines so you never have to dig again. The official demo trailer walks through that whole arc in under two minutes, from the first handful of hay to a fully automated sorting plant.
Quick answer: Find The Needle is a first-person incremental automation sim for Windows. A free demo is playable on Steam now, and the store lists the full release for Q4 2026.
What Find The Needle is
Find The Needle is developed by FindTheNeedleDev and published by Hay Passionates. The setup is short and a little eerie. You were a farmer, or at least you think you were. Now you’re inside a warehouse whose doors won’t open, and the only instruction is to find the needles buried somewhere in the pile. Nobody tells you what happens once you’ve found them all.
Mechanically, it sits where incremental games meet factory builders like the conveyor-and-machine genre. Everything is played from a first-person view, with no visible character model. You place real machines, run power to them, and feed them by belt. The store page promises a tech tree with over 300 upgrades.
Find The Needle’s early game: selling hay by the strand
Money comes from hay, and early on it comes slowly. The trailer opens at a “SELL HAY” station with an intake conveyor labelled “HAY IN” and a posted rate of $0.0222 per strand. Tossing a small clump onto the belt bumps the balance from $0.00 to $0.02. That’s the economy’s starting point.
For the manual routine, use a spade to move hay into a bucket, then empty its contents at the intake hopper. The store page also lists a metal detector as starting equipment, while the trailer emphasizes the spade-and-bucket method. A shop sign shown in the footage lists the bucket at $10 and the spade at $15.
Upgrades for this phase live on a “HAND WORK” tree. The trailer shows these entries, along with their prices and counters as they appeared on screen:
| Upgrade | Price | Status shown |
|---|---|---|
| Toy Shovel | $1.00 | Available |
| Spade | — | Owned |
| Bucket Licence | $15.00 | Owned |
| Broom | $10.00 | Available |
| Bigger Spade | $15.00 | 0/5 |
| Bigger Bucket | $25.00 | 0/5 |
| Pitchfork | $25.00 | 0/2 |
| Bigger Toy Shovel | — | Locked, 0/2 |
| Bigger Pitchfork | — | Locked, 0/5 |
| Smooth Pouring | — | Locked, 0/3 |
| Better Broom | — | Locked, 0/3 |
| Wheelbarrow Licence | — | Locked, 0/3 |
Licences gate whole tool categories, so a wheelbarrow isn’t just a purchase but something you unlock first. The full manual toolkit also includes vacuums, which don’t appear in the trailer’s tree.
Automation in Find The Needle: belts, robots, and drones
The second half of the trailer is about getting your hands out of the hay. Green and red placement holograms show conveyors being routed around the pile, along with platform frames and staircases that let you build upward around the mound.
By the end, robotic arms pull hay from the pile, belts move compacted bundles across the floor, and sorting drones fly overhead. Processed hay passes through an Inline Scanner, which counts items in a buffer (197/732 in the footage) and flags any needle it finds. In the trailer, it catches a safety pin.
Hay isn’t only sold raw, either. Production lines can turn it into other goods:
- Hay pulp
- Compressed bales
- Eco bricks
- Hay paper
- Pellets
Machines named for this include balers, hay wrappers, paper machines, and sorting machines. Selling more hay also earns you a bigger pile, which keeps the loop going.
The Find The Needle needle cabinet
Every needle you recover goes into a multi-drawer wooden cabinet. The trailer shows the player walking up to it and getting the prompt “Click LMB to add the SAFETY PIN needle to the cabinet,” which slots the pin into its matching spot. Each entry is tagged with a research value of 1.00 and a count of x1 in the footage. The cabinet holds 12 needle types:
- Bent Pin, Sewing, Safety Pin, High Pin
- Darning, Hat Pin, Bodkin, Crochet
- Leather Awl, Knitting, Syringe, Phonograph
The trailer then closes the cabinet doors to reveal a large red button with a countdown that runs down to an explosion. It doesn’t explain what triggers it, which fits the game’s refusal to say what finishing the collection actually does.
Find The Needle demo and release date
The demo started life as an early alpha on Itch.io, but that version now points players to Steam. The Steam demo went live on September 10, 2026, and it’s free. It has picked up a Very Positive rating, with 89 percent of 1,121 user reviews positive. Both the demo and the full game are currently tied to Steam Next Fest.
The release window has moved. The trailer’s closing cards list a Q1 2027 Steam release, but the Steam store page now shows a planned release of Q4 2026. No exact launch date is confirmed yet. Steam lists 17 supported languages with interface, full audio, and subtitles, and Family Sharing is supported for the full game.
Find The Needle PC system requirements
| Component | Minimum | Recommended |
|---|---|---|
| OS | Windows 10 64-bit | Windows 11 64-bit |
| CPU | 4 cores / 8 threads, i5-8400 or Ryzen 5 2600 | 6+ cores, Ryzen 5 5600 or i5-12400 |
| Memory | 8 GB RAM | 16 GB RAM |
| GPU | GTX 1050 Ti or RX 570, 4 GB VRAM | GTX 1660 Super, RTX 2060 6 GB |
| Storage | 2 GB | 2 GB |
The minimum GPU needs a dedicated card with Vulkan 1.3 support. Huge factories lean hard on the processor, so a faster CPU helps hold frame rates late in a run.
Integrated graphics are not supported and may crash the game.
If the demo hooks you, the full game can be wishlisted on its Steam store page to get a notice when it launches. Until then, the haystack is waiting, and so is that red button.
