How to use the Chemist in Schedule 1

The Chemist is an essential employee in Schedule 1 if you want to create meth or cocaine. Chemists have a lot of working parts that can make them difficult to set up, so this guide aims to make the process easier to understand and help you get your Chemist working if they stop.

How to get a Chemist in Schedule 1

To hire a Chemist, you need to go to Manny in the illegal warehouse. It costs $1,000 to hire them, and their daily wage is $300. Once you have hired your Chemist, go to the property where you want them to work and assign them a bed. This is crucial because employees will not work unless they have a bed.

Once their bed is set, you must also place money in the briefcase on their bed—this is where they take their daily wage from. Without money in the briefcase, your Chemist will refuse to work.

How to set up your Chemist

A Chemist does not work alone—they require a Handler to move supplies to and from the necessary workstations. The Chemist can operate Chemistry Stations, Lab Ovens, Cauldrons, and Mixing Stations, but they do not collect their own ingredients from shelves or pack their own products. This is where the Handler comes in. The Handler moves ingredients from the shelving unit to the necessary stations and also takes finished products to the Packaging Station.

To correctly set up your Chemist, hold the Management Clipboard and hover over them with your mouse. Press E to assign them to their bed and the necessary workstations. If you have a Chemistry Station and a Lab Oven in the property, your Chemist will be able to create meth, but only if the necessary supplies are in the Chemistry Station. To keep the station stocked, manage your Handler and set up a route that moves the required ingredients—Acid, Phosphorous, and Pseudo—to the Chemistry Station.

Why Chemists need multiple Handlers

A single Handler can only have five routes, which means they are best suited to managing just one product type at a time. If, for example, you are producing both weed and meth at the same location, it’s good to have two different Handlers—one for each product. Additionally, if you are growing large amounts of weed, you may want multiple Handlers, as Botanists do not fill pots with soil automatically (soil needs to be in their supplies shelf with the seeds). A dedicated Handler for soil management can keep your operation running smoothly if you want a shelf just for seeds.

For an optimal setup, assign your Chemist to a Chemistry Station, Lab Oven, and Mixing Table. Then, have a Handler move meth ingredients between a shelving unit and the Chemistry Station, while also transferring mixing ingredients to the Mixing Table. The Handler should also move baggies between their shelving unit and the Packaging Station. This ensures the Chemist always has what they need to keep production running smoothly.

How to fix Chemist not working in Schedule 1

If your Chemist stops working, there is likely an issue with the supply chain, and there are several things you should check before thinking that your Chemist might be bugged.

Check the Chemistry Station stock

The first thing to check is the Chemistry Station. Ensure that all three required ingredients to make meth are available. If they are missing, your Handler may not be restocking them correctly (or you may not have set up a route for your Handler to restock them).

Check your Lab Oven

If the Chemistry Station is fully stocked but the Chemist is still not working, check the Lab Oven. At most, the input section should have liquid meth ready to be processed, and the output should have a slab of unbroken meth. If both the input and output sections are full, your Chemist has no space to continue working. This means you may not have set the destination on the Lab Oven, so your Chemist won’t know where to put the finished meth.

Check the Mixing Table

If everything looks correct at the Chemistry Station and Lab Oven, check the Mixing Table. If the table is full, the Chemist has nowhere to place finished products, preventing them from continuing their work. You can manage the Mixing Station’s final destination by hovering over it with the Management Clipboard and pressing E. Ensure that finished products are being moved to a shelf or a Packaging Station.

Speak to your Chemist

If all stations are functioning properly but the Chemist is still not working, try speaking to them. They may give you a clue about what is wrong. If they are unresponsive, check the in-game time. Chemists stop working at 4am (like all of your employees), so if it is late at night, wait until morning. Sleeping until 7am will reset your workers, and you should see them start moving again as soon as you wake up.

Check your game and report the bug

If none of these steps solves the issue, save and quit your game. Then, go to your Steam library, check for updates, and verify the game files. Restarting the game should fix most issues.

If your Chemist still refuses to work, head to the official Schedule 1 Discord server and report the bug in the Bug Report channel. The development team will assist you in diagnosing the problem.