Schedule 1 Beginner Guide

Schedule I pays you for one thing: product a customer wants, at a price they accept. Pots, stations, employees and properties all exist to make more of it, make it better, or make it without spending your own time.

Every product starts from a base price:

Weed is where you start. It is the cheapest to set up, and it is what most early customers buy: 11 of the 14 customers in Northtown like it.

The base price is a floor, not what you sell at. The effects in the bag set the price, and mixing adds effects. A plain OG Kush sells for $35; three cheap ingredients you can buy from day one take it to $80. That gap matters more than any piece of equipment you can afford early.

So you have three levers, and the whole game is pulling them in the right order:

• Volume. More pots, more harvests, then employees who run them for you.
• Price. Better mixes. This is the cheapest lever by far, and the one to pull first.
• Quality. Drying, for customers who pay more when the product beats what they expect.

Grow OG Kush first. All four weed strains take the same time to grow and share the same base price. Only the seed changes, from $30 for OG Kush to $45 for Granddaddy Purple. Their own effects differ, which starts to matter once you mix, but for a first grow the cheapest seed wins.

One pot needs four things:

The pot and the light cost $60 together, once. After that, every harvest costs $40 in seed and soil, and gives 12 units after 375 game minutes - about 6 real minutes, since an in-game hour lasts one real minute. Sold unmixed at the base price, that harvest is worth $420. The first pot pays for itself with its first harvest, even before you mix anything.

Plain soil is the cheapest per harvest. The long-life bags last longer, but they cost more per harvest, not less:

They save you trips to refill pots, which is worth something once you have many pots. Early on, buy plain soil.

Lights change speed, never yield. Halogen ($40) is the baseline, LED ($80) grows 15% faster and Full Spectrum ($200) grows 30% faster. Upgrade them when you have more pots than time, not before.

Additives trade quality for something else. Fertilizer ($30) raises quality one tier. PGR ($30) brings the harvest from 12 to 16 units but drops quality one tier. Speed Grow ($30) cuts grow time by 50% and also drops a tier. The Grow Planner prices a full cycle with any combination, so you can see whether an additive pays before you buy it.

Mixing is where early money multiplies. At a Mixing Station ($500) you add ingredients one at a time. Each one adds its own effect, and can also rewrite effects already in the mix - so the order you add them in changes the result.

From the start, you can buy Cuke ($2), Banana ($2), Paracetamol ($3) and Donut ($3). That is enough to more than double the price of OG Kush. These are the most profitable mixes you can make with them, computed by the same engine as the Mixing Calculator:

Each ingredient costs $2 to $3 and adds far more than that to the price. On one 12-unit harvest, the three-step mix turns $420 into $960, for $72 of ingredients.

Two habits save a lot of wasted stock. Check a mix in the Mixing Calculator before buying its ingredients, and when you rank up, run the Recipe Optimizer with your new ingredients: it ranks every combination by profit, so you do not have to test them by hand.

One caveat: these results assume the game's standard mixing rules. If you turned on Seeded Mixing, your save uses its own rules and no published recipe applies.

Every unit has a quality tier: Trash, Poor, Standard, Premium and Heavenly. A plain harvest comes out at Standard. Fertilizer lifts it a tier; PGR and Speed Grow push it down.

Customers have standards, and each standard expects a tier:

Sell below what a customer expects and they still buy, but they are not fully satisfied. Sell above it and they pay more: the Lab counts 15% per tier above their standard.

A Drying Rack ($250) raises quality by one tier per cycle. A cycle lasts 720 game minutes, about 12 real minutes. Standard becomes Premium after one cycle, Heavenly after two.

Is it worth it early? Look at who you sell to. In Northtown, all 14 customers expect Standard or less, so a plain harvest already satisfies them. Only 20 customers in the whole game expect Premium, in Suburbia and Uptown. Spend your first money on pots and mixes, and add a rack when you start selling in those areas, or once your pots produce faster than you can sell.

There are 66 customers spread across 6 areas. Each one has their own profile: which drugs they like, the quality they expect, how often they order, how much they spend per deal, and a few preferred effects. Their budget grows as your rank goes up, so the same customer spends more later in the game.

Preferred effects weigh most when you are winning someone over. Once they buy from you regularly, what keeps them is the product they like, at the quality they expect, at a price they accept.

You do not need to memorise any of it. The customer wiki lists every customer with their likes, standards and preferred effects, and the Customer Tracker keeps track of who you have unlocked and how each relationship is going.

Selling by hand costs time you could spend growing and mixing. Dealers sell for you in their area. Every dealer takes the same 20% cut and serves up to 10 customers. There is one per area, 6 in all, and Benji, who covers Northtown, is the first you can recruit.

On a $80 unit, the dealer keeps $16 and you keep $64 without walking anywhere. That cut is worth paying as soon as you cannot keep up with orders, or as soon as your time is better spent at the Mixing Station.

Give dealers the customers you would otherwise travel furthest for, and keep the best payers close if you still sell yourself. The Dealer Manager does the assignment for you: it ranks dealers for each customer by the drug they like, the quality they expect and the distance to walk, then fills each dealer up to 10 customers.

The Motel cannot take employees, so it caps how far you can grow. Properties are what let you scale. Here is what each one costs and how many employees it holds:

Your first hire is usually a botanist: $1,500 to hire, $200 a day, and up to 8 pots or drying racks to look after. The Sweatshop at $800 holds one employee, which is enough for that first botanist. The Bungalow at $6,000 is the first with room for a real team - 5 employees, enough to split growing, mixing and packaging between people.

Before you buy, lay the place out in the Blueprint Editor. It checks that your stations fit, that each employee has what they need, and shows how much the layout produces per day - which is how you find out that a property is too small before you have paid for it.

New ingredients unlock as you rank up, and each one opens new mixes. In order:

Re-run the Recipe Optimizer at each unlock: the best mix changes as the pool grows.

Weed is not where the ceiling is. Shrooms starts at $65, Meth starts at $70 and Cocaine starts at $150. Each takes more setup. Coca grows in 1,230 game minutes, about 21 real minutes, and its leaves still have to go through a Cauldron with gasoline. Move to them once your weed operation runs without you.

Keep the effects wiki open while you learn which effects pay, and use the map to see where each customer and dealer is.

Which weed strain should I grow first? OG Kush. Every strain grows in the same time and sells from the same base price, and OG Kush has the cheapest seed.

Is mixing worth it from the start? Yes. With starting ingredients alone, OG Kush goes from $35 to $80 a unit for $6 of ingredients.

Is long-life soil worth it? Not for money. Plain soil costs $10 per harvest, the long-life bags more. They only save refills.

Does a better light give more weed? No. Lights only speed up growth. Yield comes from the container and from PGR.

Should I dry everything? No. A plain harvest is Standard, which already satisfies customers with Moderate standards or lower. Dry for the ones who expect Premium.

When should I hire a dealer? When you cannot keep up with orders, or your time is worth more than their 20% cut.

What property should I buy first? The Sweatshop if you want your first employee as cheaply as possible, the Bungalow if you are ready to build a team.

Do these numbers match my game? They come from the game's data and the standard mixing rules, and update with each patch the Lab tracks. If a mix gives you different effects, check whether Seeded Mixing is on.