The Find The Needle needles and scanners guide starts with how detection works: hay passes through a scanner, any needle inside is flagged and collected, and the working ratio is about one scanner for every two robotic arms. Scanners get added last because they slow the flow down.
How a scanner catches a needle
- Hay passes through the scanner on its way down the line.
- A needle inside is flagged and collected rather than travelling on.
- Recovered needles go into the needle cabinet, a multi-drawer wooden cabinet where each needle slots into its labelled spot, tagged with a research value and a count.
- Every product route has to pass through a scanner. A main belt alone is not enough if another branch bypasses it, so side lines and lines that rejoin after the scanner have to be covered too.
The Inline Scanner in the demo trailer shows a buffer counter, with one frame reading 197 / 732, and the trailer catches a safety pin moving through the stream. Packed hay is the other place a needle can hide, and that is what the Silo is about.
The needle cabinet
The demo's pile holds 6 needles, and finishing a cycle means collecting all six of them. The cabinet tracks each needle type you find — it lists 12 needle types, including Bent Pin, Sewing, Safety Pin, High Pin Darning, Hat Pin, Bodkin, Crochet Leather Awl, Knitting, Syringe and Phonograph, and any single pile holds six of them. Closing the cabinet doors reveals a large red button with a countdown, which is the game's deliberately unexplained ending.
What that all adds up to in one session is covered in what you can finish inside the demo.
Find The Needle needles and scanners guide: how many scanners you need
- Roughly one scanner for every two robotic arms. That is the ratio that keeps a line balanced rather than starving the detection stage.
- Add scanners after every machine on the lane, not once at the end of the whole run.
- Add them last of all your purchases, because a scanner slows the lane it sits on.
When the scanner queue backs up
A queue in front of a scanner means the arrival rate is higher than the scanner's processing speed. The fix is parallel scanning lanes:
- Split the flow with U-Splitters so several scanner lanes run side by side.
- Test each lane on its own first. Merging does not guarantee the throughput you expect.
- Merge the outputs with U-Joiners only after each lane has been scanned.
- Keep the ratio near one scanner for every two robotic arms.
Remember that the belts themselves saturate: a full arm fills the belts, and merging belts causes a slight hiccup in throughput. A steady-state estimate for the whole line is its slowest stage — compare the capacity of each stage in the same units per minute and fix the smallest one first. The splitting itself is in U-Splitters and U-Joiners.
Needles are spread through the pile, not stacked at the bottom
There is no rule saying needles get deeper as the pile shrinks. The needles are spread through the pile rather than all sitting at the bottom, so there is no simple "they get deeper" pattern to plan around:
- In one run the six needles turned up at roughly 60 million, 40 million, 15 million and 13 million hay remaining.
- Another player reported that several needles were still undiscovered until the pile was down to about 10 million, and one of those was only found after manually searching.
- Putting loose hay back on the pile can put some needles back as well — removing roughly 12 needles only raised the counter by 3 in one test.
Depth is therefore not the only problem. Needles can also hide inside packed hay products, which is why scanner coverage matters as much as digging order.