HOW TO GROW YOUR VILLAGE AND BUILD A TOWN IN MANOR LORDS

Growing your town in Manor Lords isn’t as simple as just adding more stuff to it. Sure, you need to add burgage plots and families, but you also need to build a ton of infrastructure to keep those families supplied with food, fuel, and clothing (and ale). Keeping all of the dependencies and upgrade requirements straight is a huge task on its own, let alone actually building it all.

Our Manor Lords town-building guide will walk you through taking a settlement from the start of a game, through the village settlement levels all the way up to a (small) town. We’ll also explain what to build first, and how to move around your (limited) families to get work done.

How to increase your settlement level from a village to a town

To advance in Manor Lords, you’ll need to increase your settlement level. This is a measure of how many burgage plots you have built and how upgraded they are. Each time you advance a settlement level, you’ll get a development point to spend on unlocking a new technology for your town.

• Small Village: have 5 burgage plots (level 1)
• Medium Village: have 5 burgage plots (level 1 or higher) and 2 burgage plots (level 2)
• Large Village: have 10 burgage plots (level 1 or higher) and 5 burgage plots (level 2)
• Small Town: have 10 burgage plots (level 1 or higher), 7 burgage plots (level 2 or higher), and 3 burgage plots (level 3)
• Medium Town: have 10 burgage plots (level 1 or higher), 10 burgage plots (level 2 or higher), and 10 burgage plots (level 3)
• Large Town: have 30 burgage plots (level 1 or higher), 20 burgage plots (level 2 or higher), and 15 burgage plots (level 3)

Those requirements overlap, so all of the level 2 plots count toward the level 1 or higher requirement, and all of the level 3 plots count toward both level 1 and level 2. That means you can reach a medium town with only 10 burgage plots (but you’ll have to be constantly creative with moving families around for jobs).

Use those requirements as a guideline for how many plots you should have. If you grow too fast, your town won’t be able to keep up with the villagers’ demands. Try to stay close to the minimum number of burgage plots you need.

We should also note that plots under construction don’t count toward any of the requirements; they kind of get put on pause until the construction is complete. That’s why it might look like your total number of plots drops while you’re in the process of upgrading them.

For our purposes, let’s focus on getting a town from the starting settlement up to a Large Village. And that starts with…

Plan for farming (but don’t start farming)

Before anything happens, pause your game, zoom way out, and hit the Construction button. On the left side of your screen, you’ll have Overlay options that put a heatmap overlay on top of the map.

For now, focus on emmer (wheat), flax, and barley fertility. The fertility the overlay is showing you is basically how much of a given crop that chunk of land will produce.

In the Construction menu, pick Farming and a Field. This will let you place four points to make a plot of farmland. Go ahead and build your first few farm plots. We’re not going to use them for a while, but they will just sit there until you build a farm and assign a family to it. Getting them placed early just means you don’t accidentally build over fertile farmland.

Set up a granary and storehouse

With the farmland set aside, it’s time to turn to your town. Lay down a road roughly where you want to start — preferably near where your settlers got dropped. Place a granary (2 timber, 10 stone) and a storehouse (2 timber). Once they’re constructed, assign a family to each one.

Those families will grab all of the supplies that were unceremoniously dumped on the ground and store them safely. Once the two stacks of supplies are retrieved, unassign the families (for now). You’ll need them elsewhere, like to…

Gather resources

At this point, you should have about 4 timber left from your starting supply. That’s enough to build everything you need to gather resources with one left over.

• Logging camp (1 timber) — place this in a forest where there’s plenty of, you know, timber
• Woodcutter’s lodge (1 timber) — place this in another chunk of forest
• Hunting camp (free) — place this near to (but not inside) the red circle around a wild animals icon
• Forager hut (1 timber) — place this near the berry deposit icon

As those get built, assign one family to each. That leaves one family unassigned to handle any construction you need to do while bringing in timber, firewood, meat, hides, and berries. Draw in some roads to speed up travel between your town and all the various camps you just built.

Build a marketplace

Next, it’s time to prepare for your town’s heart: the marketplace. Marketplaces are where all of your town’s good come to get passed out to the villagers. The actual mechanics of how goods are distributed is a little confusing, but you basically want your marketplace in the center of your town with burgage plots branching off of it.

Build two burgage plots with vegetable gardens and another hitching post

Starting with the road around (or near) your marketplace, draw out two burgage plots that are wide enough for expanded living space on each plot (this should cost 4 timber total). Make them pretty deep as well so they’ve got a big backyard extension slot — we usually aim for about four or so times longer than wide.

As these get built, build a vegetable garden on each, and then build the expanded living space. The garden takes no time to create, but the second house takes a while, so doing the garden first means you get plants in the ground without having to wait. These two backyard vegetable gardens will supply enough vegetables for your town for a long time.

Meanwhile, place a second hitching post (1 timber) and then order another ox for 25 Regional Wealth. That will finish off the Regional Wealth you started with, but that second ox will be a huge help in moving around construction supplies.

Build three more burgage plots

Now you can build three more reasonably sized burgage plots. Keep them wide so you can pack in more families with expansions, but you don’t have to worry about the extensions so much — just make sure they have them.

Build a charcoal kiln, well, sawpit, and tannery

With five burgage plots (level 1) built, you’ll get your first development point. There are a lot of pros and cons to each of the options for where to spend it, but for simplicity, unlock charcoal burning. This lets you build a charcoal kiln (2 timber) that turns 1 firewood into 2 charcoal — basically doubling the amount of fuel you have available. (If you’re low on unassigned families, you can swap one family back and forth between the woodcutter’s lodge and the charcoal kiln.)

Hit the Construction button and use the underground water overlay to find a spot for your town’s well (1 timber). We kind of forgot about a well (whoops), so the above image is slightly out of order.

Next, we need to turn some timber into planks, so build a sawpit (2 timber). Assign a family when it’s built — you can pause the logging camp and use them if you need to — and let them work. Watch your supplies and, when you hit 20 planks, pause the sawpit. Then you can set that family back to logging.

Build a tannery (4 timber) as well. This will take all the hides your hunters have been collecting and turn them into leather. And leather is all you need to satisfy your burgage plots’ need for clothing.

Build a wooden church

With the 20 planks from your sawpit safely stored, build a wooden church (5 timber, 20 planks, 10 stone). This should use up the last of your starting stone.

Upgrade your burgage plots

Once the church is constructed (you don’t even have to assign a family to it), you’re ready to start upgrading your town’s five burgage plots. Each upgrade costs 4 timber and all of the plot’s requirements have to (currently) be met. If you’re running low on anything, you might have to time your upgrade around when supplies hit the marketplace.

Once your first two plots upgrade to burgage plot (level 2), you’ll get another development point. The heavy plow is a safe bet here if you’re looking to get into farming (and have fertile land available), but trapping is another good option since it increases the supply of meat to your town.

Level 2 plots also unlock new workshops for the extensions. Don’t worry about those right away. Instead, watch as your burgage plots start to earn Regional Wealth. Once you get up to 25 Regional Wealth, build some chicken coops in backyards (you’ll need several). This will supply the marketplace with eggs, satisfying (or starting to satisfy, at least) another food type requirement.

Keep growing your town

At this point, your settlement is a Large Village. The next step is a Small Town, but, for the next round of upgrades, you’ll have to set up a lot more infrastructure. You’ll need a stonecutter camp, clay from a mining pit that gets turned into rooftiles at a clay furnace, and a farm for barley along with a malthouse, brewery, and tavern. You’ll also need a steady supply of at least three kinds of food. And you’ll have to turn one of your burgage plots (level 2) into a cobbler.

It’s a lot of work, but you’ve done all of the basics already in your first couple upgrades. Once all of that is humming along, you’ll be able to start upgrading burgage plots to level 3 and getting to the rest of the settlement levels.

2024-04-26T13:03:13Z dg43tfdfdgfd