If this is your first rodeo, picture Schedule 1 as Stardew Valley's black-market cousin. You cultivate illicit greens instead of parsnips, remix powdered rainbows instead of mayonnaise, and every NPC has a side hustle. It's less about morality and more about min-maxing mechanics.
Employees accelerate that loop, turning manual chores into automated cash printers. They're also surprisingly chatty, silent stares when unpaid, eager nods when the box is full, giving the world an uncanny sense of consequence.
Hiring 101
Step one is always Manny, the warehouse gatekeeper.
He's the smiling face behind the counter who quietly counts your cash before sliding a contract across the desk. Tap an employee type, choose a building, and the deed is done, almost. Each recruit needs a bed, and Oscar sells them cheap at $150 a pop.
Drop the frame, swing that clipboard, tag the pillow. Instant claim. The sheets tint to job color, white for cleaners, green for botanists, orange for handlers, blue for chemists, and a black cash box sprouts at the foot.
Cleaner
On paper, the cleaner is dull. $1,000 up front, a Benjamin each dawn, zero direct revenue. Yet skip one and you'll discover garbage slows you down.
Every trip to a litter-packed aisle shaves seconds, and seconds in Schedule 1 equal sales. The cleaner's loop is blissfully simple. Plant up to three bins, clipboard the janitor, tick the zones. They'll roam, scoop, dump, and keep your FPS silky.
Botanist
Advanced growers dabble in crop rotation even in a purely digital world. Slot high-value strains in the front row for faster handler pickups while relegating bulk-sell mids to the back. A botanist maintains whatever you tag, so smart layout cuts transit times for everyone down the pipeline.
The botanist costs $150 plus $200 a day and pays for themselves before lunch. Each one wrangles eight pots, hydrating, fertilizing, and clipping buds like a caffeinated squirrel.
Assign them by whacking pots with the clipboard; additives come from the pots' own UI, not the worker, so pre-select those boosters. Then designate a shelf stuffed with soil, seeds, and chemicals.
Handler
Don't sleep on the handler's packaging-station synergy. Packaging tables have built-in storage, turning them into pseudo-warehouses. Route one handler to top off bag stock from a shelf every few minutes, then let another shuttle sealed goods straight to dispatch. This two-handler tango means your chemist never waits for empty bags and your storage never clogs with finished stash.
Same price tag as a botanist, wildly different superpower. Handlers warp your workflow from manual haulage to automated ballet. Open the routes pane and you'll see five blank slots.
Slot one might yank additives from Storage A, slot two dumps them into Mixer 1, slot three repeats for Mixer 2, slot four drags cooked product to Packaging Station B, slot five shuttles sealed bags to the shipping crate.
Chemist
$2,000 signing fee, $300 per sunrise, and the only crew member who literally cooks.
Chemists juggle four stations, be they meth cookers or mixers, so a single blue-sheeted genius can keep two meth labs bubbling while remixing potions next door. They won't fetch supplies, so pair them with a logistics-savvy handler.
Daisy-chain mixers by setting each output to the next stage: Mixer A feeds B, B feeds C. The chemist becomes a one-person assembly line, seasoning every batch with additives you pre-stock.
Advanced Synergy
Here's a late-game arrangement that sings.
Two botanists each manage eight deluxe pots; that's sixteen crop slots pumping. One handler feeds those pots additives and whisks harvested leaves to a quartet of staggered mixers. A chemist cycles the mixers, outputting ultra-refined product into twin packaging stations. Another handler mans both tables and shuttles finished bags to the dispatch box.
Meanwhile, a single cleaner roams the floor, bin radius tuned for maximum shine. Payroll lands at $1,400 daily, yet daily profit can rocket past five grand once the cycle hits stride.
Conclusion
Employees transform Schedule 1 from a clicker grind into a management sim. Hire smart, assign smarter, and never underestimate the humble cleaner. Nurture that ecosystem of green thumbs, conveyor brains, and lab wizards, and Schedule 1 becomes a passive-income fever dream.
