Purist mode tips: just you and your gloves

What is different

• You only have your Work Gloves, so there is nothing to buy.
• Your backpack holds 40 items.
• There is no detector, so the needle can only be found by looking.
• The Travelling Trader and rewarded ads are never shown.

Make a plan before you dig

Without a detector, random digging can take a very long time, because the needle is somewhere inside a dome about 21 metres wide. The only way to beat luck is to cover the ground in an orderly way.

1. Pick a line. Choose one direction through the stack and dig a tunnel along it, from one side toward the middle.
2. Keep it head high. A tunnel you can see down is a tunnel where a sparkle is easy to spot.
3. Branch left and right. Every few metres, dig a short side tunnel. Think of a fish bone.
4. Never go back over the same spot. Empty hay looks the same everywhere, so remember where you have been.

Use your eyes

The needle is steel and it sparkles once it is uncovered, even from far down a tunnel. So lighting matters: dig during a good view of the sun, and check the end of every new chamber for a glint before you move on. It also helps to slow down. Fast, sweeping movements hide a small bright detail.

Mind the ceiling

Hay that has lost its connection to the stack falls. Wide, flat-roofed chambers are the most likely to drop. Prefer narrow tunnels with a curved roof, and never dig out the support under a big overhang. How this works is explained in How the haystack works.

Patience is the real tool

Purist can take a long time, and that is the point. Your progress saves automatically, so you can stop whenever you like and come back to the same tunnels. There is more on how the two modes compare in Classic vs Purist.