Schedule 1 was one of 2025’s freshly-cooked batches of surprise hits. Y’know, the kind that comes out of basically nowhere and lands square in the top sellers list—and while it was a year marked with these success stories, it was also the year that saw Steam starting to put the kibosh on adult-themed games. Which, one might worry, could eventually include drugs.

As a matter of fact, its creator Tyler tells our friends over at GamesRadar that this was enough of a concern to develop a backup plan in case Steam didn’t accept the game to its platform: “Early during development, I had a plan where, if Steam wouldn’t take it for whatever reason, I could just pivot it to be a farming game. Just strip all the drug stuff out, make it a farming game—but thankfully, it was all right.”

That’s not to say Tyler’s had it easy when it comes to international censorship or ratings issues. Easy enough to be a bestseller, sure, but not entirely immune to oversight: “A couple of countries don’t love it; that’s fine. Australia was one of them for a little while. We were effectively banned in Australia, which kind of sucked, but we got it there in the end.”

Which isn’t entirely surprising, given the Australian Classification Board is… let’s call it thorough, historically refusing classification to games like DayZ, RimWorld, Disco Elysium, and most recently Silent Hill f—albeit often temporarily while the board puts those games under a microscope.

Schedule 1 not being unleashed on the land down under doesn’t seem to’ve stopped its roll, though—the game has a proud all-time peak of 459,000 players on Steam, and even months away from its initial chart-busting release, it’s still got a very healthy 24-hour peak of over 13,500 players.

Still, in an alternate universe, we all might be talking about a farming sim where you cook vegetables on suspiciously-sized, meth-appropriate baking trays. Passing out parsnips in dark alleys. Delegating responsibilities to fellow farmhands, rather than friends we’ve roped into our enterprises. And doing so in Australia, which would have no cause to turn up its nose at an otherwise successful game.