Needle In A Haystack – Play Online for Free

Fastest needle finds

How to play Needle In A Haystack

1. 1

   Dig

   Walk up to the haystack and grab hay. Every handful goes into your bag, and some of it hides treasures like old coins and rings.

2. 2

   Sell

   When your bag is full, walk to the selling belt and tip it out. Hay and treasures ride up the belt and turn into coins.

3. 3

   Upgrade

   Spend your coins at the shop on a pitchfork, a metal detector, a leaf blower, a detector upgrade, a hay vacuum and bigger bags. Better tools dig faster — and get you to the needle sooner.

Tools, and when to buy them

• Bare hands

  Free

  Grab a handful of hay at a time. Everyone starts here.

  Each grab takes the hay within about 42 cm of where you aim, usually six to nine bundles. Your first bag holds 150 bundles, so a full bag takes around twenty grabs. Sell it at once: one full bag of hay pays for the pitchfork.

• Pitchfork

  150 coins

  Grabs a big forkful of hay at once.

  For 150 coins the pitchfork reaches further and takes two to three times as much hay per stab. It is the best value in the shop — buy it after your first sale. After that, a bigger bag (700 coins for 400 bundles) cuts the walking back and forth more than any other upgrade.

• Metal detector

  2,000 coins

  Always on once bought: beeps faster the closer you are to the needle.

  The detector changes the game from digging blind to following a signal. It works the moment you buy it (2,000 coins) — no need to hold it, and it picks up metal from about 16 metres away. The catch: every stack also hides a few big metal decoys — horseshoes, rusty keys, cowbells, old lanterns — and the detector beeps for those too. A decoy still sells well, so a false alarm is never wasted.

• Leaf blower

  5,500 coins

  Blasts hay away fast. Treasures stay put — but the hay is gone, not sold.

  Hold it and the hay in front of you simply flies away — fast, but you earn nothing from it, because blown hay never reaches your bag. Treasures are too heavy to blow away and stay hanging in the air for you to pick up. Use it to clear a path toward a strong detector signal, not to make money.

• Tuned detector

  8,000 coins

  Detector upgrade: ignores the decoys and points only at the needle.

  Once you own the detector, 8,000 coins tunes it to the needle alone, so decoys stop setting it off. In Free Play, where every stack hides more decoys than the last, it is the upgrade that keeps the detector trustworthy.

• Hay vacuum

  11,000 coins

  Sucks up hay and treasures straight into your bag.

  The end-game tool (11,000 coins): it pulls about 30 bundles a second straight into your bag, treasures included. Pair it with the biggest bag (1200 bundles) so you are not walking to the belt every few seconds.

How to read the detector

The detector beeps faster and higher the closer you are to the needle, and the signal bars light up in step — so it works with the sound off, too. Far away it ticks about once a second; right on top of the needle it becomes an almost continuous tone.

Walk a slow lap around the outside of the stack first and note where the signal is strongest. Then climb: jump repeatedly while you are inside the hay to scramble up, and check the signal again from above. The needle is always buried at least a metre inside the stack, never on the surface.

Not every strong signal is the needle. Each stack hides a handful of big metal decoys, and the untuned detector beeps for whichever metal is nearest. If you dig out a horseshoe, take the coins, step away and listen again: the signal will lead somewhere new. The tuned detector upgrade filters the decoys out.

When the bars are nearly full, stop walking and dig straight in where you stand. Once the needle's spot is opened, the hay around it falls away, a beam of light shoots up and a banner points you to it — walk up and pick it up.

Treasures hidden in the hay

About 3 in every 100 bundles of hay hides a treasure. Treasures go into your bag without taking up hay space, and sell at the belt together with the hay. On top of that, every stack hides 5 to 12 big metal decoys that set the detector off.

The daily challenge

Every day at 00:00 UTC a new haystack appears, and it is exactly the same haystack for everyone in the world — same shape, same treasures, same needle. You start with bare hands and no coins, and the clock runs until you pick the needle up.

Only your first run of the day goes on the leaderboard. Play it again as often as you like for practice. The weekly board keeps each player's best daily time from Monday to Sunday.

In Free Play there is no clock: your coins and tools carry over, and each needle you find earns a bounty and a fresh haystack. Every new stack is a little harder than the last: more decoys, hidden closer to the needle, and the needle buried deeper. The bounty grows with it.

Needle In A Haystack FAQ