The Find The Needle generator works like any other machine: you feed it fuel and it produces electricity. The grid is Generator → Power Poles → machines, and no machine runs without a pole connection, so the poles are the part you plan first.
What the burners accept: Hay, Compressed Hay, Wrapped Bails, Eco Bricks and Discs. So the processed products have a second use — the bales and bricks you were about to sell can also keep the lights on.
Two things decide whether the processed fuel is worth it:
- Discs hold more hay, burn longer and give the best burn-to-hay-spent ratio, but they need more machines to handle them, and more machines means more power. The best fuel only pays off once the line can carry it.
- Burner upgrades raise the throughput the burners accept and make them last longer, so an upgraded burner is what lets the compressed products through at all.
And one design point that explains the whole loop: running a hay pile out ends that pile's run by design. The game is built around running out of hay and going looking for needles, so a pile is a finite budget for the run rather than an endless supply. Buying another pile from the task and delivery board is a full-game feature and is not in the demo — the demo overview covers what the demo run looks like. If you are out of hay and short one needle, the missing needle page is the check list for that.
The fuel list comes from the discussion on the game's own Steam board, where players are asking exactly this: whether upgrading the hay building can supply enough hay for the generators once the pile runs out.
Find The Needle generator grid: Generator, Power Poles, machines
- Unlock and place the Generator. It is unlocked from the research tree and sits in the POWER branch, next to the Power Pole node you also need.
- Place Power Poles. They are cheap to build and required — a Bale Press, a scanner or a robotic arm does nothing without being connected to a pole network.
- Place the Generator in the middle of the build and branch the poles outward from it, so the poles do not take the space your other machines need.
- Connect each machine to a pole.
If several machines stop at the same moment, the grid is the first place to look — power shortage has its own checklist.
Give the Generator its own belt lane
The Generator needs a continuous feed, so route a conveyor lane into it and keep it topped up across the whole floor. Splitters make this easy: set them up so the Generator keeps running while the rest of the factory draws on the same hay.
This matters because the Generator eats the same hay you are selling. A Generator that runs dry does not look like a Generator problem — it shows up as a factory-wide power failure.
Where that lane fits in the wider layout is in factory layout and the first production line.
Reach: upgrade the poles instead of adding more
Poles are cheap, but reach is bought:
| Node | Price | Ranks |
|---|---|---|
| Power Pole | — | Base node |
| Longer Spans | $100 | 0 of 5 bought |
| Longer Drops | $90 | 0 of 4 bought |
| Underground Cable | $3k | — |
| Bigger Boiler | $80 | 0 of 6 bought |
| Bigger Firebox | $60 | 0 of 5 bought |
Bigger Boiler and Bigger Firebox raise the Generator's capacity, so you raise what one generator can supply before you place a second one from the start.
Shut the network down safely with E
Pressing E on a power pole switches the whole electricity network off, which is handy while you reorganise the layout. Demo V8 also added a power network notification effect that appears when power drops below the required threshold, so an under-powered line is marked on screen instead of failing silently.