If you ever watched Breaking Bad and thought to yourself “hey you know what? I could do that,” there’s a game to fulfill that fantasy without accruing a litany of felonies in the process. Schedule 1 is an early-access title that released this year and was created almost entirely by a single developer, though it punched well above its weight and made big waves in the gaming world. Along with a lot of attention it received on social media around its launch, the game was nominee in the Golden Joystick Awards this October, and more recently, it got the community pick for the simulation genre in the 2025 Indie Game Awards. Despite its somewhat low-fidelity–er perhaps stylistic–aesthetic, players praise it for its crass charm, reactivity, and its incredibly addicting gameplay loop that allows you to build a drug empire. And since its release, Schedule 1 has only gotten more promising. There was a major update delivered this year that greatly upped the stakes of the game by adding rival cartels you need to deal with–and just yesterday, developer TVGS dropped a brand new illicit substance (depending on where you live nowadays) for players to experiment with.
The Shrooms Update, as it’s called, adds psilocybin mushrooms, the tech needed to grow them, and a temperature mechanic that mixes up the game’s agriculture, along with other quality of life improvements. Shrooms have been fully integrated into Schedule 1’s employee automation system, and are a somewhat late-game unlock as of now. And although you’re not supposed to use your own product, of course, for quality control you can imbibe them in game and enjoy the funny visual effects the dev has added. To grow big and healthy shrooms, you’ll need to keep them warm with the new AC unit in the update, and depending on what else you’re growing you can reap the benefits of climate control for your other, leafier and greener products. To start out production of these, there is a new supplier named Fungal Phil you can purchase from, and new customers that are more than happy to buy from you. Besides this, Cartel members have been made a bit easier to ambush, imperial and metric units are now available to switch between, filing cabinets have been made functional, there’s visual improvements to some items, and there’s a laundry list of other small fixes and improvements that have been made, which you can check out in the developer log on Steam here.
The kicker to all of this: both of these updates have been elected by Schedule 1’s players, and you too can participate in deciding what comes next for the game’s journey to 1.0. TVGS has a Trello board detailing a rough, non-chronological content roadmap pulled from for the community to vote on future updates, so perhaps you can even sneak a peak at upcoming content by taking a look.