If you’ve exhausted the early-access version of Manor Lords, it’s definitely time to pick the Hooded Horse city builder back up. Adding new maps, bridge building, and transformative changes to market stalls and the economy, the rival to both Cities Skylines 2 and medieval genre cousin Bellwright is getting closer and closer to the complete experience. Once the most-wishlisted game on Steam, Manor Lord remains one of the best in the whole genre. Now, the new beta patch makes vital fixes and lets you test out extra features and terrain.
The new Manor Lords update is still in beta, but you can access it now by right clicking on the city-building game in your Steam library, selecting ‘properties,’ going to the betas tab, and entering the password ‘veryNiceBasket.’ The biggest changes are to the marketplace and stalls. From now on, you can choose to overstock distributing buildings like taverns and the marketplace – if you have an excess of resources, and want to store them up to anticipate any pending shortages, you can. You can also upgrade taverns now to level 2, and the level 1 tavern has a new visual design.
Streamlining the Manor Lords economy, in this update, only storage building workers can create market stalls, eliminating the confusion whereby other workers – like gravediggers, for instance – can own a food stall. Fuel and fabric stores have been merged into a general goods stall, and abandoned stalls will no longer be factored into calculating marketplace availability. Similarly, workers will now recover any leftover goods from abandoned stalls and bring them to ones that are still in operation.
And we now have two new maps as well as the option to build bridges. High Peaks and Winding River introduce some fresh terrain types for you to navigate and forage, and if you go into the Roads tool, you can connect your settlements to other areas across water.
Balancing the economy is a little tougher now, however, as taverns will only provide jobs for one family rather than three and woodcutters’ debranching speed has been slowed by 30%. On the contrary, iron and stone deposits are much more lucrative. The minimum iron deposit size has been boosted 60%, the maximum by 20%. Stone deposits are boosted 20% either side – minimum and maximum.
All told, this is a significant overhaul to a lot of Manor Lords’ key systems, as well as an expansion of its overall world. There are dozens of smaller details available in the complete patch notes from Greg ‘Slavic Magic’ Styczeń.
Check out some of the other best strategy games, if you’re a big Manor Lords fan, or maybe the best medieval games available on PC.
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