Manor Lords is complicated, fidgety, and greater than a bit impenetrable. There’s loads that can be acquainted about it in the event you’re a veteran of city-building video games, however Manor Lords has it’s personal idiosyncracies even with these. And that makes suggestions and tips much less vital than simply normal recommendation and fast explanations of these quirks, in order that’s what we’ll concentrate on for this newbie’s information.
Under, we’ve acquired 9 issues to know earlier than you get began taking part in Manor Lords with recommendation on issues like constructing your city, how labor works within the recreation, retaining your city fed, and managing your assets. In case you’re searching for extra detailed explainers, we’ve acquired separate guides for rising your city, rising Regional Wealth, and establishing your first farm.
Count on extra development than fight
Just like the dev said on Steam, Manor Lords is “a citybuilder with battles,” not a grand military simulator. It’s a metropolis and useful resource administration recreation first. With peaceable settings, it could actually even be downright cozy.
![Manor Lords armored soldiers in a pitched battle](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/8O24CWdggV0H_SovuHs7_udCIGM=/0x0:2500x1344/1200x0/filters:focal(0x0:2500x1344):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25418446/batt.jpg)
Picture: Slavic Magic/Hooded Horse
Don’t make fight your focus stepping into — and, for that matter, don’t anticipate fight to be a spotlight in any respect, actually. Even with aggressive opponents — bandits and different lords — battles are fairly uncommon. Build up a military means build up lots of infrastructure — mines, bloomeries, blacksmiths, logging camps, joiners, and extra — earlier than anybody even picks up a weapon.
Manor Lords is likely one of the extra infrastructure-intensive metropolis builders on the market. For instance, let’s say you wish to begin producing yarn — not even garments, simply yarn. You’ll want a livestock dealer, a sheep farm, and a weaver’s workshop at a minimal. However every a part of that course of requires a household to be assigned to the constructing(s), and households require burgage plots to reside on. That’s a naked minimal of 4 buildings already, and that doesn’t even contact on retaining the city equipped with meals and gasoline — which will increase the variety of buildings you’ll want in place earlier than you will get a single sheep a lot nearer to eight or 10.
![Manor Lords large town](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/zcBQdwSZRlkguyXZzLYyuXV4_fo=/0x0:2560x1440/1200x0/filters:focal(0x0:2560x1440):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25418479/Manor_Lords_large_town.png)
Picture: Slavic Magic/Hooded Horse by way of Polygon
That form of infrastructure interdependency and complexity holds true all through Manor Lords. Getting a city buzzing alongside easily takes lots of planning (and trial and error) to ensure you’ve acquired every thing you want in place.
All of that planning and infrastructure begins with burgage plots
Burgage plots are the fundamental unit of your city
Consider burgage plots as mixed-used zoning the place your city’s households will construct homes and workshops. Relying on the scale and form of the burgage plot, there is perhaps room for extra housing (including a home for a second household to the plot) or an extension (for a backyard or a workshop).
![Manor Lords small village with 5 burgage plots](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/NVL8HzAuIFl2JInKUAXk0nJhVDo=/0x0:2880x1622/1200x0/filters:focal(0x0:2880x1622):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25418478/Manor_Lords_burgage_plots.jpg)
Picture: Slavic Magic/Hooded Horse by way of Polygon
Burgage plot extensions are a bizarre side of Manor Lords as a result of they combine collectively housing and trade. However that trade is usually very important to your city. Early on, burgage plots can develop greens and gather eggs from yard chickens. Later, upgraded and prolonged burgage plots that you just flip into workshops are the way you’ll make every thing from ale to weapons.
There are nonetheless single-use buildings you’ll need to construct — issues like logging camps and sawpits, sheep farms and weaver’s workshops, barley farms and malthouses — however the remaining step within the provide chain is normally constructed at a burgage plot.
These standalone buildings all need to be run by a household that lives in your city as a result of…
Households are the work models in Manor Lords
You don’t have any management over particular person folks in Manor Lords. As an alternative, you’ll assign households to buildings and, by extension, assign them to jobs. Consider it like the way in which surnames and bynames advanced in late Medieval western Europe — folks working in a bakery took the final title Baker, sheep herders took the final title Shepherd, and so on.
By default (whereas they’re unassigned), households in Manor Lords do, mainly, regardless of the city wants. Normally, that is development — any buildings or upgrades you’ve gotten taking place — or escorting the city’s oxen round to haul timber (normally for development). Additionally they appear to (however don’t quote me on this — these little persons are onerous to comply with round) pitch in by shifting items to the granary, storehouse, and market.
![Manor Lords assigning a family to a job with the small stone church’s menu](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/n4afR-EQBC_aABMgUeSJTEYJlWw=/0x0:2560x1440/1200x0/filters:focal(0x0:2560x1440):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25418482/Manorlords_Screenshot_2024.04.25___17.08.49.99.png)
Picture: Slavic Magic/Hooded Horse by way of Polygon
After you have a constructing constructed, you need to hit the plus button to assign a household to work there. This takes one of many unassigned households and makes them devoted to working at that constructing. They nonetheless have a tendency the backyard or livestock on their burgage plots and, extra importantly, in the event you pause or take away the project from the constructing, they’ll return to the unassigned pool.
Talking of tending gardens…
Vegetable gardens are extra vital than farms
Farms and farmland are a factor you’ll cope with in Manor Lords as your city grows. However, particularly beginning out, they’re not as vital as you would possibly anticipate. They’re lots of work for not lots of reward. And, on high of that, farms require much more infrastructure.
![Manor Lords villager working in a backyard vegetable garden](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/GFw0-_pV-Xze864NfenaJyHAJOc=/0x0:2880x1622/1200x0/filters:focal(0x0:2880x1622):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25418475/Manor_Lords_vegetable_garden.jpg)
Picture: Slavic Magic/Hooded Horse by way of Polygon
As an alternative, it’s higher to simply construct the vegetable backyard extension onto a burgage plot. For instance, in the event you give your first couple burgage plots big backyards, you’ll be able to construct two vegetable gardens that can develop sufficient for a whole recreation — we now have one city with a inhabitants of over 200 folks that also get their greens from these first two vegetable gardens.
Gardens and the opposite burgage plot extensions value Regional Wealth to construct. And Regional Wealth is a bit complicated.
Burgage plots and Regional Wealth are associated
Regional Wealth is mainly how a lot money your city’s households have available. Regional Wealth is the place the city’s taxes come from. It’s additionally what your city will use to import items. Confusingly, it doesn’t have something to do together with your city’s market. As an alternative, because the title implies, it’s about wealth as a substitute of simply cash and that wealth comes from both exporting surplus items or simply from upgrading burgage plots.
Upgrading your burgage plots can be the way you’ll advance within the recreation. However upgrading comes with new necessities, so…
Increasing too quick will make villagers sad
Improvement factors are a reward you’ll get as your city reaches sure milestones — constructing 5 burgage plots, upgrading two of these 5 to Degree 2 burgage plots, and so forth. Upgrading burgage plots offers you entry to extra and higher extensions (like yard workshops — see above), however additionally they improve the necessities for these plots. For instance, you’ll want entry to 2 sorts of meals to improve a plot from Degree 1 to Degree 2. We’ve acquired a complete information to upgrading your city that walks you thru the primary few settlement ranges.
When you do begin upgrading burgage plots, although, the households on that plot will anticipate two sorts of meals to be out there from then on. And in case your city can’t provide that, they’ll begin to get sad, which lowers your approval and slows down your city’s progress in addition to makes your militias lose morale.
![Manor Lords marketplace](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/YMnPD5GnwtWtK6Ay_7Vo6kdjjxU=/0x0:2560x1440/1200x0/filters:focal(0x0:2560x1440):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25415138/Manor_Lords_marketplace_cover.png)
Picture: Slavic Magic/Hooded Horse by way of Polygon
Holding your city equipped is as a lot a train in build up a surplus as it’s in laying out your city fastidiously — we’ve acquired a information to how marketplaces distribute items right here.
Attempt to restrict your self to solely constructing as many burgage plots as you want for the subsequent improve and improvement level as a substitute of simply increasing your city to get an increasing number of households moved in. Typically, this can imply assigning and unassigning households over the course of a yr. Which is feasible as a result of…
All the things is seasonal
A yr in Manor Lords is split into the everyday 4 seasons — spring (March via Could), summer season (June via August), autumn (September via November), and winter (December via February). Issues occur on the earth relying on the season — for instance: you’ll be able to’t collect berries throughout winter, crops develop throughout spring and summer season after which are harvested (and replanted) in autumn, and your sheep farms don’t produce wool within the winter (the sheep would get chilly). The winter’s temperature additionally implies that your whole burgage plots and households devour twice as a lot gasoline to maintain heat.
![Manor Lords town and landscape covered in snow](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/2Jej9bdR077f_MkV99kfpyQ8xkQ=/0x0:2880x1622/1200x0/filters:focal(0x0:2880x1622):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25418455/Manor_Lords_winter_scene.jpg)
Picture: Slavic Magic/Hooded Horse by way of Polygon
That ebb and circulation of assets is how one can get away with having fewer households than out there job assignments. You possibly can have a household work on a farm through the autumn, after which swap them to a forager’s hut come spring whereas the crops develop. Or you’ll be able to transfer a household forwards and backwards between a clay mining pit and the clay furnace that turns that clay into rooftiles.
You even have a pair methods to handle renewable assets, like…
Forester’s huts offset logging camps
![Manor Lords logging camp and forester hut](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/ZjaeyClCbfqWsLhRAmJn8pCnkF4=/0x0:2560x1440/1200x0/filters:focal(0x0:2560x1440):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25418459/Manorlords_Screenshot_2024.04.25___12.09.27.40.png)
Logging for timber is a reasonably harmful course of and also you’re going to expire of simply accessible bushes fairly rapidly. You possibly can transfer a logging camp totally free, however even then you definately’ll nonetheless run out of bushes ultimately. In case you construct a forester’s hut (2 timber), although, a household assigned there’ll plant bushes. These bushes take some time to develop — they’re bushes, in any case — however pairing a forester’s hut with a logging camp can truly present a gradual (if sluggish) and renewable provide of timber.
You possibly can even change a single household forwards and backwards between the 2 jobs if it’s good to — have them develop bushes for a pair years, after which spend the subsequent yr reducing them down.
You retain your households wholesome by upgrading forager huts
![Manor Lords adding a herb garden to a forager hut](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/PB5y4B7n2L8KTDL0xJUfRyiOPio=/0x0:2560x1440/1200x0/filters:focal(0x0:2560x1440):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25418465/Manorlords_Screenshot_2024.04.25___16.59.21.70.png)
Picture: Slavic Magic/Hooded Horse by way of Polygon
One remaining improve that’s a bit more durable to note is the add a herb backyard (25 Regional Wealth, 2 planks) for a forager hut. There’s a mechanic taking place within the background the place your townsfolk can get sick — all you would possibly see about it is a fast notification. That is in all probability going to develop into extra apparent and visual as the sport continues via its early entry.
Sick villagers are much less environment friendly at work, and the way in which to heal them again up is with herbs. These herbs come from the backyard improve to a forager’s shack. As soon as they’re gathered, they’re saved within the granary and distributed at a market.