Find The Needle release date, Early Access and price

Read on 2026-10-30, the full game is Steam app 5160800 and it releases on November 6, 2026 as a "Coming Soon To Early Access" title. The listing carries no purchase price at all — Steam has not published one yet, so there is no number to quote. The free demo is a separate listing, app 5165210, released on 10 September 2026. And no official statement says whether demo saves carry over to the full game, so treat carry-over as unconfirmed rather than guaranteed or ruled out.

The two listings

The full game is bought or wishlisted from app 5160800, and the demo is a different app you install separately. Steam links them, but they are two separate downloads.

The price is not published yet

There is no purchase price on the coming-soon listing as of 2026-10-30 — no base price, no discount, no launch discount. That is the honest answer, not a missing fact on this page.

What the developer has already said about price is in the store's own Early Access FAQ: "Yes. We plan to raise the price when the game leaves Early Access, so buying now is the cheapest way to get it." So the intent is that the Early Access price is the low one and a later full-release price is higher, but the entry price itself has not been published and could land anywhere.

What Early Access means for a November 6 date

Steam's own notice on the page reads: "The developers of this game intend to release as a work in progress, developing with the feedback of players. Note: Games in Early Access are not complete and may or may not change further."

In practice that means the November 6 date can move, and the build you play on day one is not the finished game. The developer says it plainly in the same FAQ: "Roughly 6 to 12 months" in Early Access, and "Some of these plans will probably change along the way."

Two things the developer does commit to for the Early Access build:

• You can play it from the first handful of hay to the ending, where you find all 24 needles.
• Five stages of production are in the build, from hay bales and bricks up to paper, bioplastic and carbon fibre, with conveyors, pipes, power, scanners, delivery orders, blueprints and building parts.
• A Standard pile takes around 7 to 10 hours; the Mountain takes 30 hours or more.

So "Early Access" here means a large, playable slice of the factory rather than a demo-sized slice. More machines, more diggers and bigger late-game projects are planned on top of it.

Demo saves and the full game

Carry-over is unconfirmed. No official source — the store page, the store FAQ or the developer's own posts — says whether a demo save carries into the full game, and none of them says it does not. Do not plan a completion run in the demo on the assumption that it transfers, and do not assume it will be wiped either.

The practical thing to do is decide what you want out of the demo first: the demo has the whole hay-clearing and automation loop, the demo page covers what it contains, and the demo save and tips page covers backing up your save before you experiment.

What is still unconfirmed

• The purchase price, for both the Early Access build and the later full release.
• Whether the November 6 date holds. The Steam Early Access notice allows for the date to change, and the listing was previously shown only as "Q4 2026".
• Demo save carry-over.
• Whether the full game ships on any platform other than Windows. The store lists Windows only — the requirements page has the platform answer.

Check this page again

This is window content and the numbers are dated 2026-10-30. Re-read the store page for app 5160800 for the price and for any change to the date, and check the game's Steam announcements and Discord for build news once it is live. If you want to try the game first, the demo page covers how to install it, and the multiplayer and co-op page covers the community co-op mod that runs on the demo today.