Last updated: 10 August 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 routes you set. 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 commission rather than a daily wage (covered in our dealers guide).

02How to Hire Employees

Employees are hired from a fixer once you have progressed enough:

1. Complete the relevant quest that introduces hiring, then head to the Warehouse District.
2. Speak to Manny (the fixer) — he is available in the evening (after 18:00 in-game).
3. Hire the employee type you need; each has its own daily wage.
4. Assign them at your property using the management clipboard — give each a bed and the stations they should work.
5. 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.
• Keep one ingredient type per supply shelf — mixing ingredient types on one shelf causes routing bugs and stalls.
• 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.
• Heads up — a known Early Access bug can reset employee routes after a game restart, so you may need to reassign them; check your routes after loading.
• Some product lines automate more cleanly than others in the current version, so test before committing a whole property to one.