Manor Lords: How to increase your Population

Want to increase your Population in Manor Lords? The most important resource in Slavic Magic’s ambitious new city-builder Manor Lords is neither Wood nor Stone, nor even Ale: it’s Families. Families are essentially your basic unit in Manor Lords, and you get things done in your settlement by giving a family a job, such as chopping wood, or building a church, or gathering berries.

What this means is that you should aim to increase the number of families in your settlement as quickly as possible. This guide will walk you through how to increase your Population in Manor Lords by making your village as inviting as possible for new families.

How to increase Population in Manor Lords

To increase your population in Manor Lords, you need two things:

• An Approval Rating of 50% or higher.
• At least one unclaimed Burgage Plot.

It may sound obvious, but in order for a family to move into your settlement, they need a place to move into first. They’re not going to join your settlement and then wait around patiently in the middle of a thunderstorm while you build them a house.

The more unclaimed Burgage Plots you have in your settlement, the more likely it is that you’ll quickly tempt in new families to bolster your Population. Burgage Plots are a flexible building in Manor Lords, which means they’re built by placing four points to create a polygon of space where Burgage Plots can be snugly fit amongst and around each other.

After placing the four points for a Burgage Plot, you can rotate the plot (which may change the number of houses available within the plot), and you can also use the plus (+) and minus (-) buttons to add or reduce the number of plot divisions inside the area. Each plot costs 2 Timber to build. We’d also recommend placing Burgage Plots so that you have the option of expanding them later to fit an additional family. You’ll know if this is possible because you’ll see a house icon with a plus (+) next to it inside the plot somewhere.

However, even if you have the space for a new family, they won’t move in unless your settlement’s overall Approval Rating is at least 50%. You can view a settlement’s current Approval Rating in the banner at the top of the screen (look for the thumbs up icon). Approval Rating is affected by a multitude of things, but you can hover over the Approval Rating icon to see a breakdown of what’s currently affecting that value.

The easiest way to get a high Approval Rating early on in Manor Lords is to make sure all of the basic requirements for each of your Burgage Plots are fulfilled. Each Level 1 Burgage Plot needs the following to be happy:

• Water Access (a Well built nearby)
• Church Level (a Church built nearby)
• Fuel Stall Supply (a Marketplace with a Firewood Stall nearby)
• Food Stall Supply (a Marketplace with two Food Stalls nearby)
• Clothing Stall Supply (a Marketplace with a Clothing Stall nearby)

You can set up stalls in a Marketplace by adding workers to places where you store such resources, such as a Granary for Food, or a Storehouse for Firewood and Clothing.

Maintaining a high Approval Rating is very important: not only does a low Approval Rating stop new families from entering your settlement, but it means new members of an individual family won’t join existing families either (read: everyone’s too depressed for babies). And while individual population levels aren’t as important as how many families you have, they’re still important because you’ll need a lot of healthy male villagers for your armies.

That concludes this quick guide on how to increase your Population in Manor Lords. For similar guides on tackling the basics of Manor Lords, read up on how to get Influence, how to get Regional Wealth, and how to increase your Treasury.