Find The Needle is out in Early Access on PC with five stages and twenty orders

Find The Needle has left its demo behind and launched in Early Access on PC, according to a Steam announcement from the developer, Needless Games. The demo had seven orders. The full game has twenty, spread across five stages, and finding all 24 needles leads to an ending.

One thing to know first: the full game keeps its own saves, so demo progress doesn’t carry over. Your new yard starts fresh.

Five stages, twenty orders

Each stage finishes with a big customer, and signing their order opens the next stage with new machines, products and a bigger digger. The stages run from bales and panels through to fibre, carbon and the ultimate digger. Big orders wait until your cabinet holds enough needles, and the 24 needles give bonuses that reach every machine.

Metal in the hay

The pile now hides more than twenty kinds of iron and copper scrap. It rides your belts and can be sorted and sold, but it jams hay machines if it gets in. A Smelter melts it into ingots, and generators can burn it.

New machines and tools

• Machines including the Panel Press, Fabricator, Assembler, Sugar Cooker and Bioplastic Reactor.
• Two new diggers: the Hay Excavator and the Skyline Crane.
• Better drones and robotic arms, with Drone Mk II and Mk III carrying 3 and 6 loads.
• Blueprints, a Needle Hammer dismantle mode, overclocking from 1% to 100%, and underground belts and pipes.

Money, looks and Bubba

Buyers’ prices drop if you sell too much of one product, so spreading out pays. There are sixteen endless tuning cards, and most buildings now cost parts as well as money.

A Customizer lets you paint machines and structures, and there are lights, signs and a day and night cycle. Bubba, your character, now has a body, an emote wheel, a photo mode, four outfits and a flashlight. Falling hurts, too.

More ways to play

• Six pile sizes, from SMALL (Easy) to MOUNT HAYVEREST (Impossible).
• A sandbox mode with everything unlocked and free building. Sandbox runs stay off the leaderboards.
• 60 Steam achievements and leaderboards with a graph and timeline for each run.

What comes next

Needless Games says the full game is meant to grow much bigger and will have multiplayer. It expects constant updates over the next 6 to 12 months, with new machines and stages, and it’s asking for suggestions on Discord and in the Steam discussions.