Find The Needle × LibertyTalk: Talky Needle

Talky Needle connects your Twitch and YouTube events to your Find The Needle game. When Bob follows your channel, a rubber duck named "Bob" falls on your hay pile. A raid triggers a hay avalanche and throws you into the air. A channel points reward can make your detector beep up to "NEEDLE FOUND!" before revealing it was a fake.

What you need

• Windows 10 or 11.
• Find The Needle, the full game on Steam. The demo does not work: the mod turns itself off.
• Node.js 18 or later, for the bridge.
• cloudflared, to give the bridge a public address.
• A LibertyTalk account with Twitch or YouTube connected.

winget install OpenJS.NodeJS.LTS
winget install --id Cloudflare.cloudflared

Get Talky Needle

• Download Talky NeedleThe TalkyNeedle-0.2.1.zip file, with the mod, the bridge and the scripts.
• Node.js
• cloudflared

Install

1. 1

   Step 1

   Extract the zip to a folder you keep

   For example Documents\TalkyNeedle. The bridge and its settings stay in this folder, not in the game folder.

2. 2

   Step 2

   Close the game and back up your saves

   Your saves are in %APPDATA%\Godot\app_userdata\FindTheNeedle\saves. Copy this folder elsewhere before you continue.

3. 3

   Step 3

   Run the install script

   Open a PowerShell terminal in the TalkyNeedle folder and run the command below. The script copies mods\talky_needle next to FindTheNeedle.exe and adds a TalkyNeedle line to override.cfg. It keeps a copy of this file as override.cfg.talky-needle.bak.

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File tools\install.ps1

Start the bridge

Double-click start-bridge.cmd and leave the window open while you play. The bridge only receives calls on your PC, at http://127.0.0.1:7421. On first start, it creates bridge\config.json with a random token and copies the token to the clipboard without ever showing it, so it stays off your stream.

created config.json with a random token, copied to your clipboard; never shown here
Talky Needle bridge 0.2.1 (unofficial): webhooks on http://127.0.0.1:7421, game link on port 7422
10 webhook(s), 24 workflow(s), waiting for the game...

Open the F8 menu and test

1. 1

   Step 1

   Load a separate game

   Hay added by the mod can stay in the save: keep your main game aside for this test. A "Talky Needle: unofficial mod active" banner appears, and the bridge prints game connected.

2. 2

   Step 2

   Press F8

   The Talky Needle window opens, with Bridge connected at the top right. F8 or Esc closes it.

3. 3

   Step 3

   Click "Duck" on the Effects page

   The "Displayed name" field contains Viewer: close the window, and a duck with this name falls on the pile.

You can also run a workflow from a terminal opened in the bridge folder, for example to connect it to a Stream Deck:

node bridge.js fire new_follower user=Bob

Open the tunnel

LibertyTalk refuses local addresses: the bridge needs a public address to receive your events. In a second window, run the command below, then note the https://random-words.trycloudflare.com address it prints.

cloudflared tunnel --url http://127.0.0.1:7421

Connect LibertyTalk

The official "Find The Needle · Talky Needle" widget sends your live events to the bridge, through the tunnel. It is free, and each event has its own checkbox in its settings.

1. 1

   Step 1

   Install the widget

   Select your community in the sidebar. On the widget's page in the Marketplace, click Install, then open it in Widgets and keep the Global scope.

2. 2

   Step 2

   Fill in its settings

   Enter the three fields in the table below, then click Save.

3. 3

   Step 3

   Enable it

   In the Activation block, click Enable.

Check end to end

With a game loaded and the bridge and tunnel open, ask a friend to follow your channel, or use the LibertyTalk channelFollow trigger test. The Activity page of the F8 menu shows the event with the viewer's name.

Troubleshooting

What your events do by default

Set the bits multiplier

Each bit adds hay straws based on the multiplier: 10 by default, so 500 bits add 5000 straws. Change it on the Settings page of the F8 menu (x1, x2, x5, x10 or x20) for the session, or with bitsMultiplier in settings of bridgeconfig.json to keep it. At most 300 straws fall on screen: the rest goes directly to the pile and the counter, so your game does not freeze. The bits workflow caps each event at 5000 straws.

Create channel points rewards

The points webhook picks the workflow from the title of the reward, in French or English. Create a Twitch reward whose title contains one of the words below: "Wind on the pile" runs points_gust. Case does not matter, and the first word found in the list in bridge\config.json wins.

Control it from the F8 menu

F9 removes all ducks at any time. Otherwise, a duck disappears after 3 minutes, or 15 minutes for those from subscriptions and donations. The settings on the Settings page last until the bridge restarts. To keep them, edit settings in bridge\config.json.

Show a message sent by LibertyTalk

The widget sends no message. To show one from LibertyTalk, create a workflow in Workflows with the Webhook / API call action to <tunnel address>/hooks/message, using the POST method, the X-Bridge-Token header and the body below. Messages show one after the other, 6 seconds each, and at most 20 wait for their turn.

{ "user_name": "{user_name}", "text": "Merci pour le follow !" }

Edit the bridge workflows

Workflows are in bridge\config.json, with the same syntax as Talky for Project Zomboid. Restart the bridge after a change. The example below sends hay based on multiplied bits, with a maximum of 2000 straws, and 5 ducks from 1000 bits.

"bits": {
  "steps": [
    { "action": "hay_rain", "count": "{{bitsMultiplied | clamp:10:2000}}" },
    { "if": { "bits": { "gte": 1000 } },
      "then": [ { "action": "duck", "name": "{{user}}", "count": 5, "size": 2 } ] }
  ]
}

Limit abuse

In settings of bridge\config.json, maxJobsPerMinute caps viewer events (30 by default), blockedActions turns actions off and safeMode cuts safeModeBlocks, the effects on the player and the camera by default. Each workflow also accepts cooldownSeconds and userCooldownSeconds. The F8 menu and the fire command ignore these cooldowns and this cap so that you can test.

Tell LibertyTalk when a needle is found

1. 1

   Step 1

   Create an incoming webhook

   In LibertyTalk, create a workflow with the Incoming webhook trigger. It gives you a URL and a secret.

2. 2

   Step 2

   Fill in the bridge target

   In bridge\config.json, replace the PASTE_... values of httpTargets.lt_report. The bridge refuses to call a target that still contains these values.

3. 3

   Step 3

   Enable the workflow

   Set enabled to true in report_to_libertytalk, then restart the bridge. For each needle found, LibertyTalk receives event and needlesFound, which your workflow can for example write in chat.

The game also sends needle_discovered and pile_replaced. Link them to your workflows in gameEvents.