Shroom and Gloom The Facility

The Facility is Shroom and Gloom’s second pathway toward The Gloom — and it is not a reskin of the caverns you learned in the demo. Hand-drawn moss gives way to rusted metal corridors. Wooden keys become digital locks that want gunk or a hack. The practice dummy still exists, but the tunnel verbs around it have been rebuilt for an industrial setting. Team Lazerbeam revealed The Facility as the industrial counterpart to the Forgotten Path in the dev diary This Place Was Never What You Thought, embedded above. Early Access launched 10 September 2026 with both paths playable.

If you imported your demo muscle memory directly into The Facility, you will be holding wooden keys in front of digital locks and wondering why your shovel does not open a metal panel. Read How to Play before you start, then come back here for the vocabulary that makes the second deck actually work.

What makes The Facility different

The Forgotten Path runs on moss, warmth, wooden locks, and the campfire loop. The Facility runs on metal, gunk, digital locks, and data. Official previews show ominous corridors with flickering lights, hazmat corpses you can loot, chain-link fencing, broken machinery, barrels of toxic waste, and high-tech doors with glowing digital panels. Caves still appear — the developers have called the setting a fusion rather than a hard sci-fi switch — but the dominant aesthetic is retrofuturistic industrial.

The explore deck verbs change completely. You are not digging through dirt in a mossy corridor. You are clearing gunk, hacking panels, and navigating metal architecture that does not respond to a wooden mushroom key. The Explore Deck Guide covers the general double-deck loop; this page is the Facility-specific vocabulary.

Introducing The Facility — Shroom and Gloom dev diary

New explore verbs

Digital locks

Forget the wooden mushroom key. Facility doors use digital locks that require gunk or a hack to open. You cannot headbutt your way through a keypad. Official previews show glowing panels that react to an apply-gunk action rather than a key-spend. Watch for gunk as the new limited resource analogous to warmth in the cavern path.

Gunk and data

Janitor’s toolkit leans on gunk, machines, and data as the three Facility resources. Gunk opens digital locks. Machines respond to specific tool verbs. Data is a resource the Janitor class tracks for upgrades and unlocks. If the demo taught you to think of explore tools as shovels and keys, The Facility will ask you to think in gunk capacity and hack cooldowns.

Looting hazmat corpses

The dev diary shows a hazmat corpse you can loot for resources. This is a new room interaction — not a fight, not a locked door, but a lootable body. Treat it like a Foresight chest that also happens to be a narrative beat. The Facility uses environmental storytelling more directly than the demo’s mushroom corridors.

The Facility characters

Janitor

Janitor is the Facility-facing class that Team Lazerbeam has been teasing around gunk, machines, and data. Official previews show him cleaning up toxic spills, interacting with broken equipment, and navigating a setting that plays to industrial verb strengths. Janitor is not Paperboy with a different skin. The entire class kit is built around Facility resources rather than campfire warmth.

Janitor is confirmed in the five-character Early Access roster at launch. The full kit details — signature cards, ultimate, passives — belong to the paid build, not to speculation here.

Activist

Activist is listed as the fifth Early Access character alongside Paperboy, Lunchlady, Concerned Parent, and Janitor. The public kit is thinner than the other four names. Do not invent a signature card or a resource type for Activist based on the name alone. When official diaries publish Activist details, this page will update. Until then, check the Characters Guide for confirmed roster names only.

Compare with the Forgotten Path

	Forgotten Path	The Facility
Setting	Mossy caverns, wooden doors	Metal corridors, digital locks
Primary resource	Warmth, camp rest	Gunk, data, hack
Key type	Wooden mushroom key	Digital gunk/hack
Character examples	Paperboy, Lunchlady	Janitor, Activist
Card pool	~300 cavern cards	~300 industrial cards

Choose The Facility if you want to learn new verbs instead of applying demo muscle memory. The double-deck rule does not change — you still build a combat deck and an explore deck simultaneously — but every explore action in The Facility asks different questions than its cavern equivalent.

Strategy notes

Treat gunk like warmth

Warmth governed how many extra explore turns you could take in the demo. Gunk governs digital lock access in The Facility. Spending gunk recklessly on the first few doors can leave you stuck at a Facility boss with no way to open the final panel. Bank gunk the same way you bank Toasty: spend only when necessary, and keep a reserve for the door that matters.

Hack has a cooldown

If digital locks accept a hack verb rather than gunk, that hack likely has a cooldown rather than a resource cost. Cooldowns reward planning; resource costs reward hoarding. Read the actual card text before you treat hack as unlimited.

Janitor’s data is a class resource

The dev diary mentions data as something Janitor tracks. Class resources typically unlock upgrades or enable powerful effects at specific thresholds. If data behaves like a grow counter — build it up, then spend it on a major unlock — Janitor may play very differently from Paperboy’s campfire economy.

What to do on day one

1. Install the Early Access build (Steam app 3271280) if you have not already.
2. Read How to Play so the double-deck loop is not a surprise.
3. Start a Paperboy run on the Forgotten Path to refresh the core verbs.
4. Then enter The Facility with Janitor or Activist and treat every door as a new question.
5. Use the deck planner after your first Facility run to sort what transferred and what did not.

The Facility is not a tutorial. It is a second language for a game that already taught you the first. When both paths are playable, the tier list hub will track which systems and named cards dominate each pool. Until then, learn by clicking.

After the third path drops

Steam’s Early Access FAQ plans a third pathway to The Gloom during the 12-to-24-month Early Access window. That path is not a day-one promise. When it actually ships, it will be a new log under updates rather than a rewrite of this page. Follow news for the diary that names it.

Until then, two paths are enough to occupy a very long Early Access.