Cook's Assistant

The traditional first quest. Fetch three ingredients for the Lumbridge cook.

F2PNoviceVery short1 quest points

Before you start

Novice · very short · 1 quest point

Nothing to unlock first. Any account can start this one today, including free-to-play.

About this quest

The Lumbridge cook has forgotten the Duke's birthday cake and needs three ingredients he could plausibly have fetched himself. It is the first quest almost every account does, and it is designed to be: no requirements, no combat, and every ingredient within a minute's walk of the castle.

What it is really teaching is the shape of every quest that follows. An NPC asks for something, the things are scattered around a small area, and finishing means walking back. Nothing later in the game is structurally different — the distances just get longer.

Expect five to ten minutes. The only way to lose time is to walk to the windmill without a pot, which is common enough to be worth checking before you set off.

Why do it: It is the fastest quest point in the game and it unlocks the Lumbridge Castle cooking range, which burns food less often than a normal fire — genuinely useful while training Cooking early.

What makes this quicker

Buy the egg, the milk and the flour on the Grand Exchange before you start. They cost a few coins each and gathering them by hand is the entire quest.
Take all three with you when you first speak to the Cook. Talking first and fetching afterwards doubles the trip for nothing.

Walkthrough

01Before you set off

Three ingredients, three containers. Collecting the containers first saves walking the same route twice, which is most of the quest's length.

1
Take an empty bucket and an empty pot. Both spawn in and around Lumbridge Castle — there are usually a bucket and a pot on the tables in the kitchen itself.
- Bucket
- Pot
2
Speak to the Cook in the Lumbridge Castle kitchen, ground floor at the north-west corner, and agree to help.

02The three ingredients

1
Egg: the chicken pen east of Lumbridge, just north of the farm. Eggs spawn on the ground inside the pen.
- Egg
2
Milk: the dairy cow in the field north of the same farm. Use the bucket on it — a normal cow will not do, it has to be the dairy cow.
- Bucket of milk
Only the dairy cow works. If the option to milk is missing you are standing at an ordinary cow; the dairy cow is in the small fenced field.
3
Flour: take the pot to the windmill north of Lumbridge, climb to the top floor, put grain in the hopper and operate it. The flour appears in the bin on the ground floor.
- Pot of flour
Collect the flour from the bin downstairs before leaving. Operating the hopper without a pot, or leaving without emptying the bin, means climbing the mill twice.

03Finishing

1
Return all three to the Cook. He hands over the quest point and the run of his range.

What to do next

The range in the Lumbridge Castle kitchen now burns food less often than a fire at the same Cooking level, which matters more than it sounds while you are levelling on cheap fish.

The natural next steps are the other requirement-free quests around Lumbridge — Sheep Shearer and The Restless Ghost are both within a few minutes' walk, and between them they cover a quest point, some early Prayer experience and a lasting item.