Automate a Restaurant Beginner Guide: Core Loop & First Steps

What Automate a Restaurant Is

Automate a Restaurant is a simulation and incremental game on Roblox, created by m_experiment and released on May 25, 2026. You grow crops, experiment to discover recipes, cook dishes, and serve customers — and the long-term goal is to replace all of that manual work with drones so your restaurant runs itself. You can play it here on Roblox.

Controls

• PC: move with WASD, interact with E.
• Mobile: use the on-screen joystick to move and tap to interact.

That is all you need to plant, harvest, cook, and serve — the game is built around a short set of interactions you repeat and eventually automate.

The Core Loop

Everything in the early game runs through one five-step chain. Learn it first, because every upgrade later just makes this loop faster:

1. Grow — plant seeds in beds and pots and wait for them to finish. Growth is real time.
2. Release — pull the lever to move finished product into storage.
3. Collect — empty storage and pick up your cooked food.
4. Plate — put dishes out to fill customer tickets.
5. Collect money — cash only lands after service. A crop turning ripe does not pay you; a served dish does.

That last point trips up new players: you are not paid when a plant finishes growing, only when a customer is served. Keep the chain flowing end to end.

Your First Steps

• Follow the tutorial and stick to the tutorial crops. They give you guaranteed objectives and your first reliable income. Do not rush ahead to expensive or exotic seeds.
• Keep one backup crop going. A second, cheap crop keeps your beds busy while your main crop is still growing, so the loop never stalls.
• Log one working recipe before experimenting. Recipes are discovered by combining ingredients, not by reading a table. Once you can reliably cook and sell one dish, then start trying experiment pairs.
• Rebuy the same cheap seed and repeat. Volume of a cheap, cookable crop is what funds everything else early on.

Where You're Headed

Once the manual loop is second nature and you have a profitable dish or two, the game opens up: rare ingredients to hunt, mutations to breed better crops, fertilizer to speed growth, and — most importantly — drones that harvest, cook, and serve for you. You can even share one restaurant with friends in co-op (about 10 players). But none of that matters until the five-step loop above is automatic in your hands first.