How to make your first town a prosperous one.
Manor Lords is an early access survival city builder where you have to worry about more than harvesting food, building an industry, and surviving the winter. The Manor Lords map is broken into regions, and those regions contain small bandit camps, large brigand forces, and armies guided by other AI-controlled lords looking to conquer new lands for themselves. It’s a dangerous world out there!
To get you started on the long road to building your medieval fiefdom, we’ve put together some beginner tips that will help you navigate the harsh world and the challenges ahead. We’ve also got some more specific Manor Lords guides you can find linked below.Before you do anything, check the terrain
Chris Livingston, Senior Editor: Manor Lords maps are procedurally generated, so each time you start a new town the landscape and its resources will be different. When you open the construction tool a series of overlay options will appear on the right side of your screen showing where the underground water lies, as well as fertility levels for farming emmer (wheat), flax, barley, and rye.
This is useful for pre-planning the location of your wells and farms, but in some cases you might want to bail out, return to the main menu, and start a new map altogether. On one of my maps the crop fertility levels were so low in my starting region that it didn’t seem worth even getting started (you can rely on trade, but I prefer to farm). You can acquire other regions later in the game with more favorable resources and fertility levels, but before you build your first burgage, make sure your starter region has what you’re looking for.Leave enough room in your burgage plots for extensions
Chris: After a long day of work in the fields, mines, or shops, your citizens will head home. But that doesn’t mean their productivity has to end. Housing, called burgage plots, can contain backyard workshops that will passively generate goods: chicken coops for eggs, goats for leather, gardens for vegetables, and even little blacksmith shops for weapons and armor—if you don’t mind converting the entire family into artisans. You can activate these burgage extensions and pick what you’d like them to generate provided you meet the requirements.
So when zoning your burgage plots, make sure you leave enough room for the extensions. When you draw your housing zones, you’ll see an icon with a hammer in a shed above the shaded area with the house icon if your plot is big enough. See the image above as an example. If you don’t see the workshop area, then try again and draw your zoning box bigger. Invest in a second ox and expand your stable early
Chris: Building can be a slow process, but don’t be impatient with your workers: they’re doing their best. First, materials need to be brought to the jobsite, but there’s one thing your little citizens can’t carry in their arms or pull in a cart: timber. Those huge logs need to be dragged by an ox, and that ox needs to be led by one of your villagers.
