There is one needle. The pile has four million candidates.
The Queen has misplaced her favorite sewing needle in the royal hay store. The kingdom has answered with the only sensible plan: send you into the pile and keep searching until somebody finds it.
Needle In a Haystack is a cozy first-person search game for one to four players. There is no deadline, no enemy, and no conventional loss condition. Just an enormous haystack, a small royal problem, and as much time as you need.
Search at your own pace. Work carefully through one corner, dig into the middle, or bring friends and divide up the job. The needle is somewhere in there. Finding it is the entire assignment.
One strand at a time
Every new save begins with empty hands. Grab a strand, inspect it, and drop it where you want. Move searched hay aside and gradually work your way through the mound.
Bent nails, straight pins, wire, crystals, ores, and other finds are mixed into the pile. Some look promising until you get a closer look. Others are genuinely valuable, even if they aren't what the Queen asked for.
Your personal and shared search totals track the work along the way. Every suspicious little object is another reason to stop and look. Some are worth keeping. Some are worth crowns. Only one wins the game.
Share the impossible job
Search alone or bring up to three friends. Customize your villagers and enter one shared world with one shared needle.
Split up the work, compare suspicious finds, or gather around whatever somebody insists is definitely the needle this time. Each player contributes to the same search, and when one person finally finds it, the whole party wins.
Want a few more hands? Hire peasants to help spot valuable finds, then upgrade them to collect and sell those finds at the Royal Quartermaster while you keep searching. Even an impossible royal assignment gets easier when somebody else is doing some of the work.
You don't have to finish in one sitting. The host's save keeps the shared pile and each participant's progress, including tools, crowns, and contribution statistics. Return to that same save to pick up where your party left off, or start a separate search with its own progress.
Earn better ways to search
Start with your fingers, then sell recovered valuables at the Royal Quartermaster and put the crowns toward better equipment.
Shovels and pitchforks let you scoop, carry, and dump bundles of hay, changing how you work through the pile. Tool upgrades give you more ways to tackle the job.
Spend your earnings on equipment that suits the way you like to play. Keep working carefully by hand, move larger loads, or combine approaches with your friends.
None of the tools hands you the win. You still have to find the needle and pick it up yourself.
Make the search yours
Create your medieval villager with different body types, outfits, hair, and colors. Give your search party its own look before heading into the hay.
Your tools, crowns, and contribution statistics belong to that saved search, so separate saves can develop differently. Keep one search for quiet solo sessions and another for your regular group of friends.
A ridiculous task, treated seriously
One persistent search across 4,000,000 candidates
Solo play or online co-op for up to four players
First-person pickup, inspection, carrying, dropping, and sorting
A hay pile you reshape as you search
False alarms, valuable finds, and a Royal Quartermaster shop
Shovels, pitchforks, and tool upgrades
Hireable peasants who help spot valuables, with upgrades to collect and sell finds for you
Customizable medieval villagers
Independent saves with their own progress and final statistics
One shared winning needle, with no arbitrary deadline
The job is simple. The pile is not.
