Search For The Needle Chapter 2: How to Solve All 3 Basement Puzzles

The basement in Search For The Needle swaps the sunny hay farm for a locked cellar, a caged green alien, and three puzzles that sit between you and the exit hatch. Two of those puzzles change their answer every single run, which is why copying numbers off someone else’s playthrough fails more often than it works.

Quick answer: Pull the three levers on the basement floor, click the “DO NOT ENTER” sign to open the hidden room, then rotate the 16 wall tiles to match the reference picture, set the three pedestals to the number of red, purple, and green crystals in the room, and type the four-digit code found on the scattered floor papers into the wall keypad.

Chapter 2 basement objectives

The objective list in the top corner tracks three separate jobs, and only one of them is a straight hay grind. The puzzles are what drop the laser barrier over the trapdoor, so you cannot skip them and rush the exit.

Objective	What it actually means
Find the Key in the Haystack	Clear and sell hay from the basement pile until the key turns up. It unlocks the trapdoor at the end.
Pull all the levers	Three levers hidden around the room. Pulling all three opens the hidden puzzle room.
Solve Puzzles 0/3	The tile picture, the crystal pedestals, and the keypad code. Finishing all three frees the alien and retracts the lasers.

Lever locations: how to open the hidden puzzle room

Each lever is wired to a colored cable that runs along the basement floor. If you lose track of a lever, pick a cable and walk its length — it always terminates at a switch. The counter in the objectives panel tells you how many you still owe.

Head to the corner behind the main haystack, near the stack of boxes. The green-wired lever sits on the ground there. Click it to pull it.

Basement floor lever wired to a colored cable, tucked behind the haystack near stacked boxes — One of the three floor levers, sitting at the end of its colored cable. Image: Garage Games

Walk over to the sell hay cart and look behind the signboard beside it. The second lever is tucked out of sight there, off the main walking path.

Go to the area holding the Upgrade Bag and Drone stands. The third lever, on the purple cable, is on the ground in the corner behind them.

With all three pulled, find the “DO NOT ENTER” sign and click it. A short cutscene plays, the door frame lights up, and the puzzle room opens.

Objectives panel listing Pull all the levers while the player stands in front of the sealed basement door — The sealed door stays shut until the lever objective is cleared. Image: Garage Games

Note: if the counter is stuck at 2/3, it is almost always the lever behind shelving or signage rather than the one out in the open. Sweep the room’s corners before assuming it bugged out.

Tile puzzle: rotate the 16 pieces into the alien emblem

To the right of the entrance is a large picture split into 16 tiles, all scrambled. Each click rotates a single tile one step, and there is no penalty for spinning a piece too far — you just keep clicking until it comes back around.

The reference is the small picture pinned beside the board, showing the circular alien emblem you are rebuilding. Work one row at a time rather than jumping around the grid, and treat the emblem’s outer ring as your anchor: those edge segments are the easiest to judge because a wrong rotation breaks the circle visibly. The board completes on its own the moment the final tile lines up.

Player working on the 16-tile picture board with the lever objective already checked off — The 16-tile board, rebuilt by clicking each piece until it matches the reference picture. Image: Garage Games

Crystal puzzle: count the gems, then set the pedestals

On the left side of the room, three pedestals each hold a crystal — red, purple, and green — with a zero underneath. Clicking a number raises it by one. The answer is simply how many crystals of that color are stuck around the room.

Do a full pass of the room and tally every red crystal you can see. They are mounted on the walls, the floor, and the ceiling, and the ceiling ones are the batch people miss.

Repeat the sweep for purple, then again for green, keeping the three totals separate. Look straight up at least once per color.

Click each pedestal’s number until it matches the count for that color. Five red crystals means five clicks on the red pedestal, and so on.

Colored crystal lights glowing in the basement puzzle room during the counting puzzle — The colored crystals you are tallying are spread across the walls and ceiling. Image: Garage Games

The crystal layout is randomized, so the numbers change from run to run. Recorded solutions have landed on totals as different as 5 red, 4 purple, and 4 green in one session and 1 red, 3 purple, and 1 green in another. There is no universal answer to memorize — count your own room.

Keypad puzzle: find the four-digit code on the floor papers

Directly across from the tile board is a wall keypad that wants four digits. Those digits are printed on one of the many papers scattered across the dirt floor of the secret room, and the note beside the keypad spells out that you need to flip pages to find it.

Walk the floor and interact with the papers one by one. Most are blank filler, so move quickly and do not stop to read each one carefully.

When a flyer shows a four-digit number, note the digits in the order they appear. Codes seen in different sessions include 3901, 1629, and 1708, which is exactly why yours will be its own number.

Go to the keypad and press the digits in sequence. The indicator turns green when the code lands, and the third puzzle registers.

Wall keypad interface with a number button highlighted while entering the four-digit code — Entering the four-digit code on the wall keypad. Image: Garage Games

Why a puzzle won’t register

Failures in the puzzle room come down to a small set of causes, and none of them require a restart.

Symptom	Cause and fix
Keypad rejects your digits	Transposed numbers. Re-read the flyer and enter them in the printed order.
Pedestals set but nothing happens	A crystal was missed, usually on the ceiling. Recount that color from a different spot in the room.
Copied numbers from a video don’t work	Crystal totals and the keypad code are generated per run. They only ever apply to that session.
Tile board looks right but won’t complete	One tile is rotated a step off. Compare each piece against the reference picture edge by edge.

How to confirm 3/3 and escape the basement

The objective counter flipping to “Solve Puzzles 3/3” is your confirmation, and it comes with two visible changes in the room. The cage holding the green alien swings open and he wanders out, and the laser bars covering the tunnel to the trapdoor retract.

From there it is just the key. If you have not turned it up yet, go back to the basement haystack and keep clearing and selling hay until it appears. Equip it, climb the wooden ladder past the pile, and open the hatch. The cellar exits into a farmyard where the alien points skyward, a UFO beams you both up, and the run ends on a “TO BE CONTINUED… (CHAPTER 3)” card alongside your clear time and rewards.