Schedule I Beginner Guide: How to Start Your Operation

What Is Schedule I?

Schedule I is a first-person open-world simulation released in Early Access on Steam in March 2025 by TVGS, an Australian solo developer. The premise is simple and gloriously unhinged: you arrive in the fictional city of Hyland Point completely broke, set up a drug operation from scratch, and build it into a fully automated empire. [1]

It’s a business management game at its core — think Drug Dealer Simulator crossed with open-world freedom, wrapped in dark comedy and surprisingly deep progression systems. The game has earned “Overwhelmingly Positive” reviews on Steam and continues to receive major content updates. More drug types, new regions, and additional mechanics have been added since launch, and it’s still in active development with roughly two years of Early Access planned.

One thing to set expectations upfront: Schedule I does not hold your hand. There’s no tutorial pop-up walking you through what to do first. This guide exists because the first two hours are genuinely confusing without knowing the systems — and a few specific early mistakes can cost you hours of progress.

The First 30 Minutes: Exactly What to Do

Most beginner guides for Schedule I give you a disconnected list of tips. This section gives you the actual sequence — what to do, in what order, from the moment you spawn in Hyland Point. Follow this and you’ll have your first batch of product sold and your operation off the ground within an hour of playtime.

Step 1: Loot the RV Before Touching the Payphone

This is the single most important tip in the game, and it’s almost never mentioned upfront. When you start, you’re in an RV. There’s a payphone nearby that triggers the main story quest — but the moment you answer it, the RV gets destroyed as part of the narrative setup. Everything still inside it is permanently gone.

Before you touch that payphone, hold right-click on every item in the RV and pick it all up. You should collect: a watering can, 2 plant pots, 2 LED grow lights, 2 suspension racks, 1 large storage rack, and a packaging station. That’s several hundred dollars of equipment, and you need every piece of it to get your first grow running. [2]

Step 2: Water the Plants, Then Start the Quest

The RV already has seeds planted in the two pots. Water them before you do anything else — they’ll start growing while you’re out dealing with the story quests, and every hour you save on the grow timer is money sooner. Once they’re watered, answer the payphone. The RV gets destroyed (expected), you get introduced to your debt situation, and you’re directed toward a motel room that costs $800 cash to buy. That motel room is your first real base of operations.

Step 3: Get the Trash Grabber — Your First Income Source

Dumpsters and bins throughout Hyland Point contain bags of trash. Collect them with a trash grabber (available from Handy Hank’s Hardware for $25) and sell the bags at Cash for Trash machines scattered around the map. Each bag earns you roughly $12–15 in cash [5] — not glamorous, but it’s reliable income while you wait for your first grow to mature.

The trash grabber is the most consistently overlooked tool in the early game. Within a single circuit of the starting area, you can pull in $80–100 in cash. Do a trash run every in-game morning before you start any other activity.

Step 4: Meet Albert and Get Your First Seeds

Your first supplier is Albert. He’ll contact you by phone and direct you to a dead drop behind Dan’s Hardware — look for a hatch. Your first batch of OG Kush seeds comes on credit. You owe Albert, but he won’t collect immediately. Pick up the seeds, get them planted in your motel room setup, and let the grow start. [2]

Step 5: Give Free Samples, Make Your First Sales

Potential customers show up as markers on your map. You cannot sell to any of them until you’ve given them a free sample first — that’s how you convert them into buyers. Skip this step and no one will deal with you, full stop. Keep a couple of samples in your inventory at all times as you explore the map.

Your first significant sale: Peggy Myers, who’ll take 5 bags for around $200. Get that deal done, collect your money, and then immediately do the next step.

Step 6: Save the Game Right Now

Schedule I has no auto-save. None at all. You save manually using the intercom panel next to the door in your motel room — or in any property you own. If you don’t do this, a crash or accidental quit wipes everything since your last manual save.

I learned this the hard way: two hours into my first session, a crash sent me back to a blank slate. Save after every significant action — after a sell run, after buying an upgrade, after finishing a grow cycle. The intercom is right next to your door and takes five seconds. There’s no excuse not to. [3]

Step 7: Buy the Skateboard

Head to the Shred Shack and buy the cheapest skateboard for $75 [4]. Walking speed in Hyland Point is frustratingly slow, and you’ll be covering a lot of ground in the early game — trash runs, customer deliveries, supplier pickups. The skateboard cuts your travel time roughly in half and is the best value upgrade available in your first hour of play.

How Money Works: Cash, Card, and Laundering

Schedule I has two money systems and understanding the difference early prevents a lot of frustration.

Dirty cash is what customers pay you in. You can spend it directly on illegal purchases — seeds and certain back-channel ingredients. You can also deposit it to your bank account via ATM, up to $10,000 per week. What you cannot do is spend dirty cash in legitimate shops. The hardware store, the gardening centre, vehicle dealers — all of them require debit card or online balance only. [3] If you’re standing in a shop with $500 in your pocket wondering why you can’t buy anything, this is why.

Online balance is laundered money sitting in your bank account. This is what legal purchases charge to. To convert dirty cash to online balance beyond the $10k weekly ATM limit, you need the laundering system.

The Laundering System

Laundering unlocks through a side quest triggered by Uncle Nelson, who calls when you’ve maxed out the ATM deposit limit. He introduces you to the business-buying system: purchase legitimate fronts from Ray’s Real Estate, and each business quietly processes your dirty cash into clean money via a PC in its backroom. [6]

Each business converts money in batches over 24 in-game hours. Here’s the breakdown:

Own all four and you can launder up to $20,000 per day. Don’t rush to buy them all — start with the Laundromat once you’re consistently earning past the weekly ATM limit, then add the others as your operation scales up.

Your First Grow and the Production Loop

Schedule I’s core loop is: grow product → optionally mix it for higher value → package it → sell it → reinvest. Here’s what each stage actually involves.

Growing

Plant your seeds in pots or tents and water them regularly. The two LED grow lights from your starter kit increase grow speed by 15%; upgraded Full Spectrum lights push that to +30%. [2] OG Kush is your starter strain and it’s the right choice to stick with early on — it’s among the most addictive strains available at Streetrat rank, which means customers come back faster and more reliably than with other options. [5]

Mixing (Unlocks at Hoodlum I Rank)

Once you hit Hoodlum I, you unlock the Mixing Station ($500). This is where the economics of Schedule I genuinely change. Mixing ingredients into your base drug adds effects to the product, and each effect carries a value multiplier. The formula is:

Final Value = Base Price × (1 + sum of all effect multipliers)

So adding an Energizing effect (+0.22 multiplier) and Sneaky (+0.24) to OG Kush increases the per-bag value by 46%. Stack higher-value effects — Shrinking adds +0.60, Cyclopean adds +0.56 — and you’re looking at product worth two to three times the unmixed base price. [8]

The earliest accessible ingredients are Cuke ($2/unit, Energizing effect), Banana ($2/unit, Gingeritis), Paracetamol ($3/unit, Sneaky), and Donut ($3/unit, Calorie-Dense) — all available at Hoodlum I. The moment you unlock the Mixing Station, start using it. Selling unmixed product when you have a Mixing Station available is leaving serious money behind.

Packaging and Pricing

Harvested product must be packaged before you can sell it. Use your starter packaging station to process your harvest into baggies. During a deal, the game shows a “fair price” indicator at the bottom of the screen. [4] A slight markup is acceptable and most customers will take it. Excessive markups damage the relationship and lose the deal. Early on, prioritise building customer loyalty over squeezing maximum dollars per transaction — the compounding value of a loyal customer far outweighs a few extra dollars on one early deal.

Building Your Customer Base

Each customer in Schedule I has individual preferences for product effects, and the more you satisfy those preferences, the more they’ll pay and the more frequently they’ll order.

The loyalty system runs on two parallel tracks:

• Affinity: how much a customer enjoys your specific product. At maximum affinity, customers accept markups up to 60% and sometimes offer above your listed price without prompting. With a highly addictive product, you can reach max affinity in roughly 7 deals. [2]
• Addiction: builds separately based on the product’s addictiveness rating. At 33% addiction, customers start visiting at night requesting deals. At 100% addiction, they order every single day — and you only need 5 sales of a highly addictive product to get there, faster than the 6 needed to max loyalty.

Practical priorities for building your base:

• Always carry a couple of free samples for new customer markers as you find them
• Check the map daily — new customer markers unlock as your rank increases
• Match your mixed product’s effects to individual customer preferences to accelerate affinity gain
• Never accept orders you can’t fulfill — failed deliveries damage relationships significantly and take multiple successful deals to recover from [3]

One thing most guides miss: loyal customers at maximum loyalty unlock new suppliers. Your customer relationships directly gate what products and ingredients you can access further into the game. Treat them as an investment, not just a revenue stream.

Curfew Is an Opportunity, Not Just a Threat

Curfew runs from 9pm to 5am. During those hours, police will arrest you on sight and issue a fine if you’re caught outside. [3] Most beginner guides frame curfew as a danger to sleep through. That’s leaving money on the table.

Most customers will pay a Curfew Bonus — extra cash on top of the deal price — for deliveries made during curfew hours. [5] The game’s logic is sound: your customers know that night deliveries carry risk for you, and they pay accordingly. For high-value customers with large orders, the bonus can add meaningfully to your per-deal earnings.

How to approach curfew strategically:

• Early game: Sleep through it. Until you know the map’s patrol routes, the risk outweighs the reward.
• Once you know the layout: Target your highest-spending customers for curfew deliveries. Even if you get caught once and take the $100 fine, a single bonus delivery to a high-value customer covers it and then some.
• Avoid dealing in the open regardless of time — police can observe and respond to deals, and that outcome is worse than a simple curfew fine.

When to Hire Your First Employee

Employees unlock after completing the “Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy” mission, which requires acquiring the warehouse. Until then, you’re running everything manually.

Four employee types are available:

Your first hire should be a Botanist. Growing is the most time-consuming manual task in the early game — watering on a timer, harvesting, replanting. A Botanist handles all of it autonomously across up to 8 grow pods, freeing you entirely to focus on selling and customer building.

At $200/day wage and a $1,500 hire cost, a Botanist pays for itself in your first grow cycle if you’re running three or more pods. With six to eight pods going, the daily wage is negligible against the harvest value they manage every day.

Three things to know about employees: assign each one a bed or they won’t work. Pay wages via the briefcase at the end of their bed. Ensure they have physical access to their assigned stations — a Botanist locked out of the grow room by a misplaced object will just stand around burning your daily wage. Manage all assignments via the Management Clipboard (press 9, then E). [2]

The Rank System: What to Focus on Early

Schedule I has 11 rank groups (Streetrat through Kingpin), each split into 5 tiers — 55 progression stages total. XP is earned through sales, completed missions, and customer interactions. Each rank tier gates access to new regions, new products, new ingredients, and new mechanics. [7]

Here’s what matters for the first stage of the game:

Your immediate goal is Hoodlum I. This single rank is a step-change — more customers, a new region, the Mixing Station that doubles your per-unit value, and the ability to hire employees. Everything in the Streetrat ranks is preparation for this jump.

Don’t waste early XP sources. Every sale, every new customer unlocked, and every completed story mission builds rank. Focus on converting all available Northtown customer markers first — that’s your densest XP cluster before you can access Westville.

Seven Mistakes That Kill Early Progress

1. Answering the Payphone Before Looting the RV

Worth repeating: answer the payphone first and your starting equipment — worth hundreds of dollars — is gone permanently. Loot before you trigger the quest. Every time.

2. Not Saving

No auto-save, full stop. Use the intercom in your motel room after every milestone. Losing hours of progress to a crash or accidental quit is the most common new player complaint and it’s entirely avoidable.

3. Trying to Buy at Legal Shops With Cash

Dirty cash doesn’t work at legitimate shops. If you’re standing at the Hardware Store with money in your pocket and nothing’s adding to cart, you need to visit an ATM and deposit first. Shops charge to card/online balance only.

4. Accepting Every Order

Customers will request more than you can supply early on. Accepting an order you can’t fulfill damages the relationship — sometimes badly. It’s always better to decline upfront via your phone than to fail a delivery. The game lets you delay or cancel orders; use that feature. [3]

5. Skipping the Trash Grabber

At $12–15 per bag [5] with dozens of bags available across the map — replenishing each in-game day — the trash grabber generates more income across your first three days than your first grow does. Don’t ignore it.

6. Spending Early Money on Cosmetics

Clothes, tattoos, haircuts — none of it affects gameplay. Wait until Peddler I rank before touching the customisation menu. [5] By then your revenue is high enough that cosmetics won’t dent your operation budget.

7. Leaving the Mixing Station Unused

Once you hit Hoodlum I and unlock the Mixing Station, use it immediately. Even cheap early ingredients like Cuke (+0.22 multiplier) and Paracetamol (+0.24) push your per-bag value up meaningfully from the first batch. Selling base product when you have a Mixing Station available is one of the most expensive habits in the game.

Your First Milestones: Where to Aim

Once the basics click, here’s a rough progression sequence to guide your first several hours:

1. Motel room secured, first grow underway
2. Skateboard purchased ($75)
3. 5 customers unlocked via free samples
4. First $1,000 cash earned and saved
5. Regular sales circuit established
6. Hoodlum I rank reached
7. Mixing Station purchased, first mixed batch sold
8. Warehouse mission completed
9. First Botanist hired
10. Laundromat purchased ($4,000) once you’re hitting the ATM deposit limit

That sequence takes you from absolute beginner to a functioning semi-automated operation with a clean money stream. From there, Schedule I opens up considerably — new products, new regions, dedicated dealers taking commissions so you can step back from direct sales, and eventually an empire that generates revenue without you on the street every day.

The early game is the steepest part of the learning curve. Once you’ve got your first 10 customers generating daily income and the Mixing Station running, the rest is iteration and scale. Build it methodically, save often, and don’t overcommit on orders until your operation can genuinely keep up with demand.

See also: best games like Schedule I.

Ready to stop dealing manually? See our Schedule I Full Automation Guide to set up Chemists, Handlers, and Botanists for passive income.

Sources

1. Schedule I. TVGS. Steam, 2025.

2. Newbie Guide. Schedule 1 Wiki. Fandom, 2025.

3. Ambrose, Kristy. Beginner Tips For Schedule I. Game Rant, 2025.

4. Sengupta, Abhinaba. Schedule 1: Best Beginner Tips and Tricks. Deltia’s Gaming, 2025.

5. Singh, Harshit. Top 10 Tips for Beginners in Schedule 1. Sportskeeda, 2025.

6. How to Launder Money in Schedule 1. TheGamer, 2025.

7. All Ranks and What They Unlock in Schedule 1. TheGamer, 2025.

8. Schedule 1 Mixing Guide: All Ingredient Effects. Game Rant, 2025.