The Cook Queue
Your Cooking Area runs a limited number of cooks at once (your permanent + temporary cooking lanes, capped at 6). The Cook Queue is the waiting room behind them: line cooks up and each one starts automatically the moment a cooking lane frees, so a busy Kitchen never blocks you and you don't have to babysit it.
The queue is available to everyone — no subscription or unlock required.
- A queued cook reserves its ingredients up front. They're set aside the moment you queue, so nothing else can spend them while the cook waits.
- Cancel a still-waiting cook for a 100% refund — the reserved ingredients come straight back.
- A cook that has actually started no longer takes up a queue slot — it's moved onto a cooking lane, freeing that queue slot for the next one.
Queue slots
The queue has its own pool of slots, separate from your cooking lanes:
| You have | Queue slots |
|---|---|
| Any player (free baseline) | 5 |
| Signal subscriber | 10 (replaces the free 5, not on top) |
| +10 tranche (optional purchase) | +10 on top, for 7 days |
A +10 tranche costs a flat 5,000 RSNC / $5 USDSC and lasts 7 days. Tranches stack window-wise — buy it again and the window extends (buy it 10 times and you'd have the extra 10 slots for 70 days). When a tranche lapses while cooks are still waiting in those extra slots, those cooks are grandfathered — they still run to completion; you just can't add new ones until the queue drains back under your live capacity (the queue shows this as "draining").
A slot only counts while a cook is waiting. Once a queued cook starts and moves to a cooking lane, it stops counting against your queue slots — so starting a cook immediately opens a slot for the next one.
Adding cooks to the queue
- Queue a recipe — open the Cook Queue and tap Queue a recipe, pick one, and it drops into the next open slot.
- Cook chain — on a multi-step recipe, Cook chain queues the whole dependency chain in one go. Each step waits on the outputs of the step before it and starts as soon as those exist, so you can line up "refine → assemble → cook" and walk away.
- Queue a Transmute — the Transmute modal has a Queue button beside Start (see below).
Cooks dispatch in order, but the queue is smart about dependencies: a chain step that isn't ready yet is skipped over so an independent cook behind it isn't stuck waiting.
Reordering and cancelling
- Move up / move down — reorder a waiting cook to change which one dispatches next. (A cook that's already cooking is pinned — it's on a lane now.)
- Cancel — cancel any waiting cook for a full ingredient refund. Once a cook has started you can't cancel it (it's mid-cook), but it's already off the queue by then.
What can and can't be queued
Most cooks can be queued, with two limits:
- Recipes with an RSNC cost can't be queued (yet) — a queued cook is dispatched automatically with no wallet signature, so it can't pay an on-chain RSNC burn. Cook those by hand.
- You can only queue a recipe you could actually cook right now. If your Kitchen Level is too low for a recipe — or you've outgrown a Prep recipe's max level cap — the queue tells you to level up first ("Your Kitchen Level is too low… level up, then queue it") instead of quietly accepting it and leaving a stuck entry. This is checked the moment you queue, so you get the answer immediately rather than watching a cook sit forever.
Flash snacks keep their one-per-window limit in the queue too — you can't stack multiple copies of the same flash snack.
A queued cook that never gets a chance to start (e.g. your lanes stay full for a full day) expires after 24 hours and its reserved ingredients are refunded automatically. In normal use cooks dispatch long before that.
Queueing a Transmute
Transmute is the Kitchen's Prep recipe (unlocks around Kitchen Level 10) that converts one Standard base ingredient into another — handy when you're long on one family and short on another. It burns 4 of the input per 1 of the output and you pick a bulk tier (×1 / ×5 / ×10 / ×20 / ×50). It's deterministic — it always succeeds — and equipped-gear Elegance can still upgrade the output's rarity on the reveal.
Two conveniences make it quick:
- It opens ready-to-go. The modal pre-selects the base ingredient you own the most of as the input, so you're not starting from a blank picker — just pick what to convert into and press go.
- Queue instead of cook now. Hit Queue (beside Start) to reserve the ingredients and let the sweeper cook the Transmute when a lane frees — the result is identical to cooking it immediately.
Where cooks show up
- In the queue modal — waiting, cooking, or "waiting on prerequisites" (a chain step whose inputs don't exist yet), with the slot pool at the top.
- In your Activity log — queueing a cook writes a "Queued …" row and cancelling one writes a "Removed a queued cook" row (with the ingredients returned), so there's an audit trail of what you lined up.
See also
- Recipes & Cooking Slots — cooking lanes, success odds, the recipe roster
- Cook Chains — how ingredients flow into multi-step recipes
- Signal Subscription — the 10-slot queue baseline + a 4th cooking lane