The Find The Needle when to build robotic arms and drones answer is short: robotic arms come first, because they are the collection stage, and they go in before or alongside the belts that carry away what they dig. Drones come later, once sorting is the side of the line holding you up. Mid-game is the point where the constraint changes from cash to throughput.
Find The Needle when to build robotic arms and drones: arms first
- They come first. An arm digs hay out of the pile and puts it on a belt, so there is nothing for a belt to carry until an arm is producing.
- A full arm extracts about 3,500 hay strands per minute, as long as there is hay within reach.
- Collision detection caps how many fit on one level. One recorded run fitted roughly 20 arms, and arms need physical clearance between them.
- They fill the belts fast. A saturated arm backs up into the belt network, so scale out with several parallel extractor-and-belt lanes rather than one giant lane. Merging belts causes a slight hiccup in throughput.
The lanes and belts that arms feed into are covered in factory layout and the first production line.
Drones are the later sorting tier
Drones sit above the belts and sort what comes down them. The demo trailer shows sorting drones operating overhead once the belts are running, so the order is: arms dig, belts carry, drones sort.
Do not build drones before the belt network under them exists — there is nothing for them to sort.
Mid-game: cash stops being the problem
Early on you are short of cash: everything costs money — machines, belts, power stations and upgrades — and there are no building materials to manage. Paper mills become the obvious source of income once you can run them.
After that you are no longer short of cash, you are short of throughput, and the work becomes scaling the line:
- Several parallel extractor-and-belt lanes instead of one.
- Splitters to distribute, mergers to collect.
- Power poles branched from generators in the middle.
- A scanner on every lane after every machine — roughly one scanner for every two robotic arms.
The demo gates the tech behind 10 delivery quests, so clearing those is the mid-game target. At maximum arm level, clearing 10,000,000 hay takes about 48 hours. Read those numbers as moving targets: the demo has changed belt snapping, machine prices and hay rendering several times since launch, so check the current values in your own build rather than a figure written down weeks earlier.
The purchase order that gets you to mid-game is in making money and the first purchase round.
Move the arms as the pile shrinks
Arms lose reach as the hay recedes, so move them closer together as the pile shrinks. In one run with 8.5 million hay left and about 20 arms working, the remaining work was roughly 2 more hours at best.
Watch the line before leaving it unattended — the game does not promise an unattended farming layout.