The Find The Needle factory layout that works is built backwards: start at the stand marked SELL HAY and work your way toward the machine that supplies the hay. Build in that direction, test a small batch before you add branches, and you get a line you can actually debug instead of a tangle you cannot trace.

Find The Needle factory layout: build the line backwards from the sell stand

  1. Leave a clear approach to the stand. You have to be able to walk up to it and hand-deliver hay, so do not wall it in.
  2. Use the stand's own snap connection for the last belt section. Since Demo V8 the conveyor at the Hay Sell Stand snaps to the stand, so the final segment attaches itself.
  3. Connect backwards toward the machine that supplies the hay. Each section you add should have an obvious upstream neighbour.
  4. Keep the Conveyor Belt right beside the haystack. Otherwise you are still walking back and forth, which is the single biggest drag on early income.

The endpoint of the whole line is the sell stand, and the belt work is different from the power work — belts, splitters and the launcher live under HAY LINES, while the generator and its wires live under POWER.

Feed a small batch and trace it

  1. Send a small batch through rather than a full belt load.
  2. Trace it to the sale point and confirm the money display changes.
  3. Only then add branches.

If the money does not move, you have not built a factory, you have built a queue.

Split the flow into parallel lanes

The machinery is slow, so one long lane stalls. Use Splitters to split the line into several parallel lanes, and keep hay flowing through them rather than piling up in front of a slow machine.

Splitting is done with the U-Splitter, and merging is done with the U-Joiner — how those two work is the next thing to know once you have more than one lane.

Branch power poles out from the middle

  1. Place the Generator in the middle of the build.
  2. Branch Power Poles outward from it so the poles do not take the space your machines need.

The pole network is what makes the machines run, and the power grid page has the full wiring pattern including how to extend reach without stringing more poles.

Build upward when the ground is full

Buildings have collision detection, so a dense layout means building upward on platform frames and stairs around the haystack. Robotic arms need physical clearance between them, which caps how many you can fit on one level.

When the ground run is genuinely full, that is the signal to start scaling with robotic arms and drones rather than squeezing more machines into the same footprint.

Break belts into small sections

Long belts are painful to edit. Break a run into smaller mixed-size sections and a single section can be deleted or re-routed without tearing down the whole line.