9 Manor Lords tips to know before you get started

Manor Lords is complex, fidgety, and more than a little impenetrable. There’s a lot that will be familiar about it if you’re a veteran of city-building games, but Manor Lords has it’s own idiosyncracies even with those. And that makes tips and tricks less important than just general advice and quick explanations of those quirks, so that’s what we’ll focus on for this beginner’s guide.

Below, we’ve got nine things to know before you get started playing Manor Lords with advice on things like building your town, how labor works in the game, keeping your town fed, and managing your resources. If you’re looking for more detailed explainers, we’ve got separate guides for growing your town, increasing Regional Wealth, and setting up your first farm.

Expect more construction than combat

Like the dev said on Steam, Manor Lords is “a citybuilder with battles,” not a grand army simulator. It’s a city and resource management game first. With peaceful settings, it can even be downright cozy.

Don’t make combat your focus going in — and, for that matter, don’t expect combat to be a focus at all, really. Even with aggressive opponents — bandits and other lords — battles are pretty rare. Building up an army means building up a lot of infrastructure — mines, bloomeries, blacksmiths, logging camps, joiners, and more — before anyone even picks up a weapon.

Manor Lords is one of the more infrastructure-intensive city builders out there. For example, let’s say you want to start producing yarn — not even clothes, just yarn. You’ll need a livestock trader, a sheep farm, and a weaver’s workshop at a minimum. But each part of that process requires a family to be assigned to the building(s), and families require burgage plots to live on. That’s a bare minimum of four buildings already, and that doesn’t even touch on keeping the town supplied with food and fuel — which increases the number of buildings you’ll need in place before you can get a single sheep much closer to eight or 10.

Image: Slavic Magic/Hooded Horse via Polygon

That sort of infrastructure interdependency and complexity holds true throughout Manor Lords. Getting a town humming along smoothly takes a lot of planning (and trial and error) to make sure you’ve got everything you need in place.

All of that planning and infrastructure starts with burgage plots

Burgage plots are the basic unit of your town

Think of burgage plots as mixed-used zoning where your town’s families will build houses and workshops. Depending on the size and shape of the burgage plot, there might be room for additional housing (adding a house for a second family to the plot) or an extension (for a garden or a workshop).

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Burgage plot extensions are a weird aspect of Manor Lords because they mix together housing and industry. But that industry is often vital to your town. Early on, burgage plots can grow vegetables and collect eggs from backyard chickens. Later, upgraded and extended burgage plots that you turn into workshops are how you’ll make everything from ale to weapons.

There are still single-use buildings you’ll have to build — things like logging camps and sawpits, sheep farms and weaver’s workshops, barley farms and malthouses — but the final step in the supply chain is usually built at a burgage plot.

Those standalone buildings all have to be run by a family that lives in your town because…

Families are the work units in Manor Lords

You don’t have any control over individual people in Manor Lords. Instead, you’ll assign families to buildings and, by extension, assign them to jobs. Think of it like the way surnames and bynames evolved in late Medieval western Europe — people working in a bakery took the last name Baker, sheep herders took the last name Shepherd, etc.

By default (while they’re unassigned), families in Manor Lords do, basically, whatever the town needs. Usually, this is construction — any buildings or upgrades you have happening — or escorting the town’s oxen around to haul timber (usually for construction). They also seem to (but don’t quote me on this — those little people are hard to follow around) pitch in by moving goods to the granary, storehouse, and marketplace.

Image: Slavic Magic/Hooded Horse via Polygon

Once you have a building built, you have to hit the plus button to assign a family to work there. This takes one of the unassigned families and makes them dedicated to working at that building. They still tend the garden or livestock on their burgage plots and, more importantly, if you pause or remove the assignment from the building, they’ll go back to the unassigned pool.

Speaking of tending gardens…

Vegetable gardens are more important than farms

Farms and farmland are a thing you’ll deal with in Manor Lords as your town grows. But, especially starting out, they’re not as important as you might expect. They’re a lot of work for not a lot of reward. And, on top of that, farms require even more infrastructure.

Image: Slavic Magic/Hooded Horse via Polygon

Instead, it’s better to just build the vegetable garden extension onto a burgage plot. For example, if you give your first couple burgage plots huge backyards, you can build two vegetable gardens that will grow enough for an entire game — we have one town with a population of over 200 people that still get their vegetables from those first two vegetable gardens.

Gardens and the other burgage plot extensions cost Regional Wealth to build. And Regional Wealth is a little confusing.

Burgage plots and Regional Wealth are related

Regional Wealth is basically how much cash your town’s families have on hand. Regional Wealth is where the town’s taxes come from. It’s also what your town will use to import goods. Confusingly, it doesn’t have anything to do with your town’s marketplace. Instead, as the name implies, it’s about wealth instead of just money and that wealth comes from either exporting surplus goods or just from upgrading burgage plots.

Upgrading your burgage plots is also how you’ll advance in the game. But upgrading comes with new requirements, so…

Expanding too fast will make villagers unhappy

Development points are a reward you’ll get as your town reaches certain milestones — building five burgage plots, upgrading two of those five to Level 2 burgage plots, and so on. Upgrading burgage plots gives you access to more and better extensions (like backyard workshops — see above), but they also increase the requirements for those plots. For example, you’ll need access to two kinds of food to upgrade a plot from Level 1 to Level 2. We’ve got a whole guide to upgrading your town that walks you through the first few settlement levels.

Once you do start upgrading burgage plots, though, the families on that plot will expect two kinds of food to be available from then on. And if your town can’t supply that, they’ll start to get unhappy, which lowers your approval and slows down your town’s growth as well as makes your militias lose morale.

Image: Slavic Magic/Hooded Horse via Polygon

Keeping your town supplied is as much a exercise in building up a surplus as it is in laying out your town carefully — we’ve got a guide to how marketplaces distribute goods here.

Try to limit yourself to only building as many burgage plots as you need for the next upgrade and development point instead of just expanding your town to get more and more families moved in. Sometimes, this will mean assigning and unassigning families over the course of a year. Which is possible because…

Everything is seasonal

A year in Manor Lords is divided into the typical four seasons — spring (March through May), summer (June through August), autumn (September through November), and winter (December through February). Things happen in the world depending on the season — for example: you can’t gather berries during winter, crops grow during spring and summer and then are harvested (and replanted) in autumn, and your sheep farms don’t produce wool in the winter (the sheep would get cold). The winter’s temperature also means that all of your burgage plots and families consume twice as much fuel to keep warm.

Image: Slavic Magic/Hooded Horse via Polygon

That ebb and flow of resources is how you can get away with having fewer families than available job assignments. You can have a family work on a farm during the autumn, and then swap them to a forager’s hut come spring while the crops grow. Or you can move a family back and forth between a clay mining pit and the clay furnace that turns that clay into rooftiles.

You also have a couple ways to manage renewable resources, like…

Forester’s huts offset logging camps

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Logging for timber is a pretty destructive process and you’re going to run out of easily accessible trees pretty quickly. You can move a logging camp for free, but even then you’ll still run out of trees eventually. If you build a forester’s hut (2 timber), though, a family assigned there will plant trees. Those trees take a while to grow — they’re trees, after all — but pairing a forester’s hut with a logging camp can actually provide a steady (if slow) and renewable supply of timber.

You can even switch a single family back and forth between the two jobs if you need to — have them grow trees for a couple years, and then spend the next year cutting them down.

You keep your families healthy by upgrading forager huts

Image: Slavic Magic/Hooded Horse via Polygon

One final upgrade that’s a bit harder to notice is the add a herb garden (25 Regional Wealth, 2 planks) for a forager hut. There’s a mechanic happening in the background where your townsfolk can get sick — all you might see about this is a quick notification. This is probably going to become more obvious and visible as the game continues through its early access.

Sick villagers are less efficient at work, and the way to heal them back up is with herbs. Those herbs come from the garden upgrade to a forager’s shack. Once they’re gathered, they’re stored in the granary and distributed at a marketplace.