Shroom and Gloom Progression & Unlocks: What to Do Next

Quick Answer

If the Facility is still locked, keep pushing the Forgotten Path until you finish that progression route and enter the Gloom. My first verified completion unlocked Lunch Lady, the Facility and Janitor together.

Once those are available, switch to Janitor in the Facility for forward progression. The Activist’s locked character card gives the next objective directly: Reach the gloom via the facility.

Shroom and Gloom progression is easier to follow once I separate finishing a run from finishing the objective that actually opens something new.

A good attempt can add cards to the wider pool, reveal new interactions or teach me a much stronger route without unlocking another character. The larger jumps happen when a quest condition resolves, and the first progression result I could verify cleanly came after taking Paperboy through the Forgotten Path and continuing into the Gloom.

That run finished with 80 enemies killed, 15 tunnels explored, 73 cards collected, one card forgotten and 158 Food consumed. None of those numbers acted like an unlock requirement. They are useful because they show what a real successful run looked like; the progression trigger came from completing the route, not from hitting a particular kill, tunnel or Food total.

Finish the Forgotten Path Before Chasing Side Objectives

For a fresh file, I would make reaching the Gloom the first major target.

You do not need to turn that run into a full tunnel-mapping attempt or delay progress because one branch is still unexplored. The immediate route is simply:

Paperboy → Forgotten Path → finish the final encounter → enter the Gloom → resolve the run

The Forgotten Path walkthrough covers the route, camps and resource decisions before the final encounter. Once the boss itself becomes the blocker, the final boss guide owns that fight and the transition into the Gloom.

For progression purposes, the important checkpoint is what happens after you get through.

The First Gloom Completion Opens Three Things at Once

The successful Paperboy result screen showed Quest 15 complete, followed immediately by three major unlocks:

• Lunch Lady
• Facility
• Janitor

It also opened additional cards for later runs.

That is the point where I stop thinking of the Forgotten Path as the only useful place to be. Lunch Lady gives me a new way to replay that route, but the next unexplored progression path is now sitting somewhere else: Janitor in the Facility.

This distinction matters because it is easy to unlock Lunch Lady, enjoy the new deck and assume another Forgotten Path clear must be the next required step. It can be a worthwhile run, especially for tunnel discovery or a different build, but it is no longer the shortest route toward the next major unlock.

Janitor + Facility Is the Next Forward Route

The Facility changes enough that I treat it as a fresh progression problem rather than a harder version of the Forgotten Path.

Janitor starts working with Gunk, cleaning, Data and Machine interactions, and that changes both combat and what I value while exploring. Trying to carry over the same drafting logic from Paperboy made my early Facility attempts much rougher than they needed to be.

The Facility walkthrough covers those route-specific decisions. For this page, the important part is simply the handoff:

Facility unlocked + Janitor unlocked → start pushing the Facility if you want the next main character unlock.

Activist: The Game Tells You the Requirement

After opening Janitor and the Facility, I checked the character screen again. Activist was still locked, but the game gave a direct quest requirement:

Reach the gloom via the facility.

That wording is more useful than trying to infer the requirement from how far a run feels like it progressed.

I have reached the Facility’s final encounter with Janitor and still died there. That did not satisfy the Activist objective because I never reached the Gloom through that path.

So when Activist remains locked after a long Facility attempt, I do not go back and repeat the Forgotten Path hoping something else will trigger. The unfinished objective is still inside the Facility.

Reaching the Facility Boss Is Not the Same as Completing the Facility

This is the progression distinction that caused the most confusion for me.

A deep Facility run can feel like meaningful progress because it absolutely is meaningful progress: I can learn how Gunk behaves, discover stronger Janitor combinations, see more of the route and improve what future runs have access to.

But the Activist requirement is much stricter than “reach the last fight.”

It says Reach the gloom via the facility.

That means I judge the attempt by the actual quest state rather than by how close the run felt. If the boss kills me before I reach the Gloom, I have learned more about the route, but I have not completed that progression step.

A Failed Run Can Still Improve the Next One

One reason progression can feel less linear than a normal level-based game is that failure is not always a reset to the same starting point.

New cards and discoveries can change later runs even when the current character quest is unfinished. That makes two questions worth separating after a death:

Did this run improve my future options?

Did this run satisfy the quest that opens the next character or pathway?

I care about both, but they answer different problems.

If Janitor reaches deep into the Facility, I may come away with a much better understanding of what the deck needs. That can make the next attempt substantially stronger. Activist, however, stays locked until the Facility objective itself is completed.

This is also why I do not call a difficult run wasted just because the unlock screen did not change.

Concerned Parent Follows a Separate Quest

Concerned Parent does not appear to sit directly inside the Paperboy → Gloom → Facility progression chain.

The locked character card gives a different requirement:

Beat the beast that lies at the end of act two.

I treat that as a parallel character objective.

If I am trying to open the next major route, I continue into the Facility. If I am trying to unlock every character, Concerned Parent becomes a separate target that I can pursue without confusing it with the Activist requirement.

I have not verified a reliable step-by-step route to that Act Two beast yet, so I would follow the quest text rather than assume a specific branch or character requirement that the game has not clearly confirmed for me.

When It Makes Sense to Return to the Forgotten Path

Opening the Facility does not make the Forgotten Path obsolete.

I still have reasons to go back: unexplored tunnels, another character, a different build, or a quest that belongs to that pathway. What changes is the reason for returning.

If my only goal is pushing the main progression farther, another Forgotten Path clear stops being the priority once Lunch Lady, Facility and Janitor are already available. At that point, Janitor has a more important job to do elsewhere.

The progression state I use is:

• Facility locked: continue the Forgotten Path until the Gloom progression result resolves.
• Facility and Janitor unlocked, Activist locked: push the Facility with Janitor.
• Facility boss reached but the run ends there: the Activist objective is still unfinished.
• Concerned Parent locked: treat the Act Two beast as a separate character quest.
• Forgotten Path already cleared but tunnels remain: return for exploration or completion rather than expecting the same clear to advance the Facility chain.

Once I started reading the game this way, the unlock structure stopped feeling vague. The useful question after every run became less about how far I travelled and more about which quest condition actually changed.