HAND WORK upgrade tree: Toy Shovel for $1.00 at the root

About this game

Developer: FindTheNeedleDev · Publisher: Hay Passionates · Platform: PC (Steam) · Art style: Minimalist & vector · Screen type: Focus / Tech Trees

More Find The Needle screens in the Gallery

What to study

A tech tree for a game about one joke, taken completely seriously: you upgrade the tools that search the haystack - shovel, spade, broom, bucket, pitchfork, wheelbarrow - and even permissions are nodes (Bucket Licence, Wheelbarrow Licence). Locks are counted in the game's own currency of progress (0/5, 0/3: needles found), prices stay in plain dollars, and owned tools close their cards with DONE. It is the trailer's only true interface screen - the rest is first-person hay - which is itself the design statement: the fantasy needs almost no UI, so the one screen it has is a tidy, legible tree. Frame at about 0:21 in the Find The Needle Trailer (Steam), extracted in the dense 1-frame/2s review pass (the scene-change pass returned only four barn pans) and inspected at full resolution in this run; the right-edge crop is disclosed in the elements.

Patterns

How the screen is arranged.

panel-grid detail-card

Components

Parts on screen.

Card Portrait Progress bar

Screen inventory

• three columns of tool cards joined by thin lines on black, every card tagged HAND WORK with a tool portrait: column one - Toy Shovel $1.00, Spade DONE / OWNED (gold-highlighted, cursor on it), Broom $10.00, Bucket Licence DONE / OWNED
• column two - Bigger Toy Shovel LOCKED 0/2, Bigger Spade $15.00 0/5, Pitchfork $25.00, Better Broom LOCKED 0/3 - the counters read as needles found toward unlocking, prices and progress sharing one card grammar
• column three runs out of the trailer's pan at the right edge: Bigger Pitchfork LOCKED, Bigger Bucket $25.00, Smooth Pouring $25.00, Wheelbarrow Licence LOCKED - the tree is wider than this one view, disclosed here
• state is typography: purchasable tools show a green price, owned ones read DONE / OWNED in gold, locked ones grey out to LOCKED with their fraction

Top 3 colors

#030505 27%#020404 21%#0c0d0c 21%

Top three palette colors by share. The remaining colors make up the rest.

Source and credit

© FindTheNeedleDev / Hay Passionates, Find The Needle screenshot: Find The Needle - Find The Needle Trailer video (Steam), shown for design study and commentary. PlayCraft is an unofficial fan project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Hay Passionates.

Source tier 2 (publisher-released) · screenshot: Steam store page · Steam page

Source details

Fetched 2026-10-21. verified 2026-10-22: frame extracted in the dense-interval review pass at 20.5s and inspected visually at full resolution in this run; keeper file upgrade-tree.png is a byte copy of dense/f_20.5.png

no published policy found (checked 2026-10-22); fair-use study use, takedown honored within 48h

Rights holders: see Copyright & takedown.