Schedule 1 doesn’t play, despite being a video game. When you actually get down to brass tacks of growing your fledgling criminal empire, a surprising amount of learning is in order. In the early game, you’re just a simple weed dealer, but you’ll quickly find your customers and dealers demand more. Once you’ve grown past the need for buds, you will need to start progressing into more advanced production chains, and that means Coca Leaves. And that means you need to unlock Cauldrons in Schedule 1.
Be sure to check out some of our other Schedule 1 guides to learn every tip when it comes to growing your new empire! For now, let’s keep reading to learn more!
How To Use Cauldrons in Schedule 1
Before you can even cook the coca, you need to grow it. Be warned, Coca takes a VERY long time to grow from seed. You will need to spend a lot of time watering these plants, and they won’t produce as many leaves as the starter bud seeds. The payoff here is that the mixes made from coca are much more potent, and thus much more expensive.
Once you’ve grown your coca, it’s time to choose what to do with it. If you need product immediately, processing the Standard quality base will be fine. But for late-game you need to move up higher in the Quality tiers.
The five rarity tiers of product are:
Trash (Dark red ★)Poor (Green ★)Standard (Blue ★)Premium (Pink ★)Heavenly (Gold ★)
You will get Standard product as long as your plant is properly watered and doesn’t spend too much time in the Needs Watered state. Standard is your goal for the first couple dealers, as most of the customers really only need that tier of quality. Fertilizer and Drying Racks are crucial here. Start by applying fertilizer to the plant as its growing, then dry it on a rack to improve the quality BEFORE you process the leaves.
Once you’ve grown your leaves, now comes the hard part. But first, a word on how to actually unlock cauldrons in Schedule 1.
How To Get The Cauldron
The cauldron can be purchased from the warehouse next to the pawnshop after you’ve unlocked Enforcer 1. This is pretty late into the game, and you will likely have a solid production chain setup so far. Ideally you have a business laundering money before you really jump into this, but it’s not totally needed. A cauldron costs $3,000, so bring plenty of cash with you.
This rank will also unlock the Docks region, so be ready to expand with more customers and dealers. Have some extra Premium product on hand to hand out as free samples to build your network faster.
Personally, you only need 2-3 cauldrons in Schedule 1 to fully stock a decent grow op. The number of plants you need to keep more than that running 24/7 would fill up the barn and cost a ton to run in staffing costs.
Now, on to actually using the thing.
How To Use The Cauldron
You can put up to 80 coca leaves inside a cauldron at once, and 20 cans of gasoline. Each batch uses 20 leaves and one can of gas, so don’t think you need hundreds of cans of gas to make a coca run work. The downside of this large storage capacity is two-fold: one is the time it takes to process, and the other is the post-cook mixing you need to do to make the base into usable product.
If you assign a Chemist to do the cooks, make sure to fill them up with gas and leaves to keep the cauldrons cooking away constantly.
You will also need Lab Ovens to turn the Base the cauldron produces into Cocaine. Take the base 10 units at a time and put it into ovens. I find that 2 Cauldrons can reliably supply 3 Lab Ovens with a consistent flow of Base.
