Haystack

Video trailer: https://youtu.be/RonxkoLZ4p0

A planet covered in haystacks, as far as the eye can see. Somewhere in all that hay there is a single needle.

Every piece of hay you mine has a one in a million chance of being the needle. Find it, hold it, and you have beaten the planet. Everything else, you build from hay.

Two ways to play

Find the Needle (the proper way) is a scenario. You crash land on Haystack with a pistol, a couple of burner drills and furnaces, and not much else. Build up from hay until you have mined enough of it to turn up the needle, then get it into your hands to win. Start it from New game > Scenarios.

A side trip in Space Age: Haystack is also a planet in a normal Space Age game. Research Haystack once you have space platform thrusters, and fly there whenever you like. Holding the needle researches Found it!.

Hay

• Mine it and burn it: hay and hay bales are fuel from the start.
• Sift it for iron, copper and stone, by hand, in the burner hay sifter or in the electric hay sifter. Each sifter keeps

up with one mining drill of its tier.

• Bale it: bales burn longer, and placed, they make a cheap wall.
• Ferment it into oil, or cook it into coal.

Rats

Rat nests sit around the haystacks. The scent of hay mining wakes them up, and their rats come for the hay on your belts. They drink from your pipes, leave droppings, and breed.

• Droppings are the starter culture for wet hay. Wet hay ferments, and an oil refinery turns fermented hay into

crude oil. Haystack has no crude oil of its own.

• Rat farms: pen rats in with walls, feed them hay and water, and belt their droppings out.
• Pick them up to carry them somewhere, but they wriggle free after 20 seconds, wherever they are.
• Scarecrows keep wild rats out of an area, and leave your own rats in peace.
• Don't overcrowd them: too many rats in one place knot together into a hostile Rat King.
• Rats can't resist the needle. Whoever holds it gets followed around by every rat nearby.

Also

• Patchwork countryside around the haystacks, with hedgerows, boulders and the odd cliff, for wood and early stone.
• Its own music, Bluegrass Factory and Gambling Needle.
• With Space Age, Haystack itself in the background of space platforms in its orbit.

Requirements

• Factorio 2.1.
• You need to own Space Age, because hay ferments by spoiling. Find the Needle plays with the Space Age mod switched

off; visiting Haystack as a planet needs it on.

• PlanetsLib is supported but optional.