Last updated: 5 September 2026

Schedule I Automation Guide — Employees & Lab Setup

Automation is what turns Schedule I from a hands-on hustle into a passive empire. Once employees grow, mix, and move product for you, income scales with your properties instead of your time. But the system has real depth and a few traps. This guide covers the employee types, hiring, and the handler-route setup that makes a self-running lab actually work.

01The Five Employee Types

Each employee handles a different part of your production chain, for a daily wage:

• Botanist — plants, waters, and harvests at grow pods. Handles growing, but you still restock seeds and soil on the supply shelf.
• Chemist — operates mixing and processing stations, but only works if a handler has stocked the station with ingredients.
• Handler — moves materials between shelves and stations along up to five routes you configure. The critical link that keeps everything fed.
• Cleaner — keeps the property tidy, which matters for keeping the operation running smoothly.
• Dealer — sells product to customers for a cut of the sale (around 20%) rather than a daily wage. Unlike the other four, dealers aren't hired from Manny — see below (also covered in our dealers guide).

02How to Hire Employees

Botanists, chemists, handlers, and cleaners all come from the same fixer; dealers are a separate, in-person recruitment:

1. Reach Hoodlum V rank to unlock the Warehouse in the Warehouse District — this also kicks off the quest that introduces it, though finishing that quest isn't required to use the Warehouse.
2. Speak to Manny (the fixer) upstairs in the Warehouse — he's only around at night, roughly 18:00 to 6:00 in-game.
3. Hire a botanist, chemist, handler, or cleaner from Manny; each has its own daily wage.
4. Recruit dealers separately — approach an NPC flagged as a potential dealer on your phone map and offer to work together, usually for a one-time signing bonus rather than a daily wage.
5. Assign everyone at your property using the management clipboard — give each a bed and the stations they should work.
6. Pay daily wages in cash, placed in the briefcase next to each employee's assigned bed — miss wages and they stop working.

03Handler Routes: The Heart of Automation

Handlers are the piece most players get wrong, and without them nothing flows:

• A handler route is an ingredient type plus a source shelf plus a destination station — it tells the handler what to move and where.
• Each handler supports several routes, so one handler can feed multiple stations.
• Chemists do not self-load ingredients — they only work if a handler has already stocked the station, so handlers are mandatory, not optional.
• Dedicate each supply shelf to one stage of the chain rather than one big shared shelf for everything — it keeps handlers from grabbing the wrong ingredient and stalling a station.
• Assign stations carefully — a chemist can run several stations, and a botanist can tend multiple grow pods.

A working loop is: handler stocks the grow supplies and stations, botanist grows, handler moves harvest to the mixing station, chemist mixes, handler moves finished product to storage.

04Setup Tips & Known Issues

A few practical points make automation reliable:

• Open the management clipboard at any property to assign beds, stations, and routes for each employee.
• Start small and verify the loop before scaling — confirm one full grow-to-product cycle runs hands-free.
• Scale across properties — bigger properties hold more employees and stations, multiplying output.
• Employees can get stuck idle — a blocked pathway, two employees sharing one shelf or station, or a route that never got finished can leave someone standing around doing nothing. Sleeping or restarting the game is the common workaround; if it happens often, recheck the offending route on the clipboard.
• Some product lines automate more cleanly than others in the current version, so test before committing a whole property to one.