BEST Tips & Advice after 350+ Hours In Manor Lords 

I’ve been experimenting with Forager layouts. A normal deposit produces 440 berries per season, generated in 11 ticks from mid-March through mid-June. A rich deposit yields twice as much - 880 berries per season, spread between the same 11 ticks. If placed just right, 3 total workers staffed at two forager huts and one granary can fully harvest a normal node; 6 workers with their own buildings can fully harvest a rich node (again, if placed just right). The berry specialization perk only doubles the internal storage limit within the berry patch, it doesn’t actually produce more berries.

We need more control over who builds a stall. I have plenty of supplies and plenty of stall locations available but they won’t build them, while all 8+ of my granary workers run a stall with barely anything in them.

Market places bugged me so when everyone under the sun wanted to open their own stalls. Now I cap the area to only allow 10 stalls (2 firewood, 3 clothing & 5 food) with all the owners being granary or storehouse. That setup is enough to satisfy 40ish burgage plots, and is obviously scalable. So many headaches saved once I just limited how many can spawn and of what type (all about mathing out how many resources you actually need). Ever since I've never had any marketplace issues nor productivity loss from everyone wanting to peddle 😅

I really wish you had more control over who owned stalls. There should be options for each industrial building/storage building to "add market stall" and it will only be opened by one of the workers within that building.

Another tip I'd give for early game money. Make dyes with any surplus of berries you have, and sell the dyes without opening a trade route. If you still have a big surplus of berries even while making dye throughout the year, go ahead and sell a bunch of berries without a paid route too. Dye sells for 4 each. It does take a dedicated worker family to run the dye station, but I've found that this family can often work as the food stall owner too. Provided there isn't much other food collecting needing to happen and the food stall/granary is super close to the dye station. This effectively lets one free up the granary worker and still gets production done as well as the food stall worked all at once. A win, win, win win! Oh and this works great even with a tiny sized village and normal berry node. 200-400 berries allows for year round dye production and double sales including berries, so long as other food is forthcoming.

Only you and tacticat have up to date info. Invaluable advice. Great content.

Market stall pro tipp: You can MOVE stalls from one Marketplace to another! Pause the game, raise a new marketplace and move the stall via move button after clicking on it. Much easier than the destroy and rebuild from the beginning in this video

A lot of scientists, professors, mathematicians, and researchers in the comments; who needs a tutorial when we've got an info pool and community such as this! Thanks for your efforts, fellow Lords; and to Strat and Cat for leading the charge.

You can actually place 3 mining pits in a iron/clay deposit after the beta patch. Just place them in a triangle shape with the edge of the first one on top of the deposit but taking as little space as possible.

The other nice thing with multiple forager huts is that that they can all each be upgraded to grow herbs. These herbs slightly slow down the berry picking during the berry growing season. However, the herbs can be picked any time of the year that they have finished growing, which doesn't need to be in this berry growing window of time. I have to test to see if the herbs can be picked in the winter. I know I have picked them in the summer and autumn at least! Even in this berry growth season, the herb picking barely slows down the berry pickin' imho. For anyone unfamiliar with the herbs in Manor Lords, they just act like an on demand healing item. People that get sick will automatically use them and thus recover to working status quicker. I have not yet tested to see if anyone actually goes to pick up the herbs or if they magically get teleported to the sick person as they are resting. Although the herbs don't sell for a lot, they can be nice to have to send out to other fledgling expansions. I hope the mechanics for doing such trades/sharing will be improved and bugs fixed. It feels bad to have mules that are even more stubborn than in real life!!!

Still have yet to find any better Manor Lords videos out there. Yours are always the most informative/have the most actual testing + data. Sick stuff.

Very, very helpful and I've watched less than half of this. I'm convinced on the default build order. Don't worry about granary, storehouse first - logging, housing. Don't chase the extra unit by waiting on the Manor build. Corpse pit: use 1 of these with a road around it to survey for a perfect 3xsingle plot w/bkyd extension, for the first 3 houses on default build, another one for the next 3 and so on. TactiCat recommends 2 Corpse pit long rectangle for the duplex single plot farm, bearing in mind inefficiency identified in this guide. get the bkyd extension line as close to the houses as possible to shorten the walking distance.

Bro - you need to send this dev team your patreon and they should hire you part time. You've done so much thorough research and testing for this game - it is insane. I think of all the games I play and content I've seen, yours sticks out the most. The GOAT. You remind me of a data analytics engineer who loves strategy games, and you apply your knowledge into videos. You are the man.

This was the best video I have watched from you I think ... well explained, very straightforward and easy to understand! thank you for all the effort you put into your videos :) I really enjoy watching all your manor lords content! keep em coming, thanks for keeping me company each day :)

You missed the source reason it is bugged in the section between 9min to 12min. The reason is because each Marketplace (no matter how many stalls it contains), start from 0 to distribute goods to the house for the variety sake thing. That means, as soon as you need more than 1 stall of one type (let's say food), let's say for simplicity sake, we only have lvl 1 burgage, so 2 food needed per house. if you have only 1 market place containing enough stalls, stalls 1 will do the 25 closest houses and then stalls 2 will do the 25 next for a 100% coverage. If you have 2 marketplace (near each other), with each 1 food stall.. the 1st food stall will populate the 25 closest house, but food stalls #2 will populate these same houses that were already covered by the other stalls, because they are in an independant market place. You can somwhat fix this by having a design where stalls are in the middle of a scallable section, and always prioritize (by distance), the houses that are not already covered by other stalls, but the more you scale that, the more it become impossible to reach 100% as you cannot choose which stalls will get filled first. so you'll always have a spot where it's not covered because of that. I have a cool plans for a scallable city, where I can scales squares of 300pop infinitly, with just enough stalls (food / cloth and firewood) in the very middle of each of those. but because of that, I can't make this happen, if they fix it so different marketplace doesn't overlap each other, this will be possible to use different marketplace with the same type of stalls. Right now the only way to get 100% is to have maximum 1 marketplace (containing enough stalls) per type of goods (so either 1 big with all 3, or 1 per type (clothing, firewood, food). In your example at min 11 where you rebuild the marketplace, I you rebuild these 3 food stalls in a different marketplace, (still side by side), you still won't have 100% coverage. Because of my explanation

50:31 Tip for max difficulty + no berries and meat achievement 1. Build a woodcutter 2. Build a saw mill and employ with one 3. Build a wood-chopper and employ it with one 4. Build two houses + chicken coop (that's two eggs a month) 5. Keep building 3 more. One of them goes for goats later 6. Get the honey development and stop sawing you should be having enough planks for apiaries and church by this point. 7. Build a church asap, this is crucial as people may die of starvation the first and second month , but families must stay at all cost and approval must be 25%+ 8. Then build a trade post (not earlier) and sell planks and extra firewood, to get the money for more coops and goats. *Build everything close to each other to reduce travel building time. *Play with the first 5 families wisely. No more than 5 leathers as a start. Sell the hides after. *If you manage to build and get ready one veggie farm the first year - you are good to go.

Just finished my first game of Restoring the Peace on standard settings, and your channel has been great to help me keep going and understanding the workarounds for bugs. Thanks! This is going to help me slowly work my way through getting all the achievements.

1:01:34 You can actually still cram 3 iron mines on to a node on the new patch - one on bottom, 2 on top - if anyone is interested for their weapon and armour trade empire.

I didn’t realize rebuilding the market stalls would bypass the supply bug. Really, I hadn’t realized it was a bug - I thought there was some mechanic I was failing to grasp. Thanks! My cold and hungry people will no longer stare longingly at those full market stalls right outside their window.

The micro-management of the market stalls is enough to make you walk away from this game.

Amazing advice on optimization, marketplace, development points and even trading. Thank you for helping the Manor Lords community. Tacticat brought me over to you. Cheers mate!

Nice tip bro and congrats on getting your 100k subscribers been watching since Bannerlord perk guide happy to see your channel grow

Awsome guide! Helps a lot. Thank you so much.

Outstanding guide to the game in Beta. Comprehensive and extremely helpful in explaining all the game mechanics. Many thanks for the effort you put into this.

Good content on the marketplace. I will have to watch again. I did the demolish and rebuild to get to 100 percent coverage on 400 pop. It took 10 years of game time to figure it out.

This was so informative. Thank you!

I find it incredibly useful to return here when I'm working on a particular problem and find the timestamp that might help. Thanks!

Super awesome and helpful, thank you!

The early game tip to sell items on the Kings Road (without a trade route) is HUGE!

Its great to hear that I am not crazy, and there could be issue with game about market stalls. And thank you for clearing that distance between house and market stall is not an issue. I will just demolish and create market stalls again

Oof you have saved me a lot of time on the markets. It's surprising how little market stalls you actually need for a pretty decent sized town.

Unbelievable video as always. I actually strangelt found the starting out section which I wasn't even expecting the most helpful. But everything g was pure gold.

I started my game yesterday. Never played this type of games. Opened trade route for stone, set 30% tax, established a barley field in October and after snow there is nothing left (crops died? lol), enemy AI baron captured all other regions, set double family home as tailors without any flax, and so on. But I learned a lot from your video, 🙏 big thanks

Nah, just say "Oh, shoot, I forgot I have a doctors appointment to go to, bye , I got to go...".

Nice video thanks! The best way I've found to get the exact market stalls being run by the exact family I want, particularly once your town starts getting big, is to pick a spot of land off to the side and layout a grid of temporary single stall markets. Everyone who wants to build a stall will do so, and you can check to see who is running each one. Once you've found the families you want, delete all the unused single market spots from the grid, then layout where you want your targeted market stalls to be. One by one, delete the temporary stalls of the families you want and remove the grid Market space they were in. The family will setup a new stall in the targeted market space. Repeat until everyone is where you want them to be, then delete your temporary market grid. It's a bit of a PITA, but it works.

I did really need a tip for market stalls thanks you ❤

This guide is well structured, easily explained with great information.. I have come back to this several times now and I am not even out of my first year. This one gets bookmarked, thank you.

Thanks! the market supply and production of goods helped me the most

Awesome!! Wow!!!! Soooo much great info!!!! Thank you!!!!!!! Will need to play more 🙂 Farming: 4) would love to see how you started up that farming town. Like a clip from your stream. Build order and stuff like that. How to transition from 5 people to 15 and when to put farmhouse and size of fields, etc. etc. I find it easy if I build up a small town (20+ families to start a militia, etc.), then start-up farming; but I think there's probably a faster more efficient way.

Thank you so much for the tips around markets! I’ve been having trouble with them 😅

Thank you so much about explaining how market stalls work and the importance of controlling them because man, I was getting annoyed over having soooo many firewood and food but not always reaching all houses. I am not a smart person so even if I had over 100 hours gameplay, I wouldn't have figure it out for myself so thank you again for this video.

when trying to switch a market stall to be supported by a warehouse worker, simply remove the families that are supporting that stall, temporarily. The stall will know that it's empty and look for a supporting worker which will be provided by the storehouse or granary when no others are present. The stall notes this that removing the supporting family will force another family to support. Once your support is in place, move the families back into the jobs they were before.

This video along with the comment section is very informative! Both answer a lot of questions anyone might have about this game.

One possible correction / clarification: in setting limited work areas for farming, it appears to me that they only farm fields if their centre (where the harvest gets piled up) is inside the defined work area.

I really needed a video like this

A note about the hunting limit. I would advocate to set the limit to at least 10 (the default), or possibly 11. I keep seeing hunters bring the number of animals down to 6 or 7 sometimes, even if I have the limit set to 10. If ever going for multiple hunting camps and many families set to them, I'd suggest setting the limit even higher. Maybe even 15 on a normal node! They seem to not update when it's ok to hunt after they decide to do it. So multiple people can get their bloodlust on and all of a sudden the remaining number of animals dips dangerously low! This is even more so the case with a rich animals node snd with all the hunting related dev points and perk. I'd suggest setting the limit to 20 or so to be safe if using 10-20 hunting families (5-10 full camps etc). The dangers of dipping below the limit will be deminished with this scenario tho since the people going out to trap will be chaotically spread out all over the place, lessening the likelyhood of over hunting the actual node.

My sucking at Manor Lords makes it fun to me. My first play run I lasted all of 5 minutes. Built 5 plots and spent all the regional wealth within seconds on eggs. Quicky learned how bad that plan was. I have utilized several of your tips.

great vid, much better than others to view as a beginner

Thank you very much for this video, excellent study material.

Great thumbnail! xD not sure if insulting your audience is the preferred strategy in your industry, but yourr the bossman ! /J Am so hype for stone ramparts and fortifications

I did hours of testing on the Trading Post and concluded that the order they are stocked is based on the order in which the items were changed to exporting, not the tab order. I even reset them all and selected in reverse order and the stocking followed that pattern. Also the Trading Post does not need to be on the King's Road, it only needs to be on a road connected to it.

Thank you for all the info and advice, Strat. Thank you, too, all my fellow Lords, for helping me make my builds run so much more efficiently. Great stuff, everybody!

This is the best Manor Lords video yet, the only video someone needs to start playing, well done.

ive taken to moving the source producer stalls (like the tanners) to satellite markets near them manually - it abandons but then gets reoccupied. I have the main market primarily warehouse stalls- i wish i could turn off markets for warehouses with items we need to trade - like coal. and i really hate it when a warehouse i made for a specific item gets firewood put into it for some reason and so that pure storage wearhouse becomes a firewood seller - for one piece of firewood that never sells.

Finaly really useful guide explaining basics

Hey Strat, Awesome video as always! Great work man! Quick question I hope to get an answer to: In 2 of my 3 playthroughs I had a "jackpot" of a rich clay and rich metal province, I immediately set up a build around those two resources to bring in the money (following some of your previous tips ofc ;) ) However, when I reach the point when I need to convert to the deepmine something happens (probably a bug) that the warehouse workers do not come to pick up the iron anymore and workers need to carry it out one at a time In both of my playthroughs this happened. Had an issue like that? Seen that you focus your industry around the resource so I guess that is one way to work around it - but in my "esthetic" villages I had a smithy and smelter share an allocated plot with a warehouse a bit away from the deepmine but for sure in an optimal walking distance Keep up the good work man!

One thing is that it doesn’t matter where the trade post is. As long as u attach a road to it and that said road is also connected to the kings road it will work.

This is so useful....thank you....I've been failing miserably on challenging settings - will definitely try your start up strategy. Market stalls was also critical info...now I understand ;) (.965)

Great vid, thanks. Had some questions along the vid but you covered those later on, so good job. The only thing I'm kinda interesting is animal farming/trading. Is it not worth it? Still, any hints there? PS also, why no grow emmer?

Great video, good job.

The first tip about market stalls is great of course, but the example started to unravel towards the end of it. In my experience if one wants to get a market stall worked by a specific family/work station, that station must have at least one of the resource for the desired stall for the family to auto work it. At the end of your example, the food stall by the hunting camp still wasn't being worked by that family even after you were switching them. My best guess is that at the time you were attempting to force it, that building did not have food in it's inventory. Must have just been picked up or something right before you paused I suppose?

Really good video! Thank you! Do you have any idea when the new patch level will be available to users at Steam, and/or what fixes/improvements the dev is working on next?

At 2:09:22 right at the very end, is my favourite part. NOW I know why sending pack stations to my startup villages drains them of all their coin! Pack stations should be placed on the smaller economies side, despite the opportunity cost ;) of using a human resource at the smaller pop centre.

Love your stuff. Learn a lot every time. I’m trying to figure out how to deal with the Baron and claiming his territory.

Hi, I played long time too. You're right, this game isn't too hard at all. In fact, it's kinda easy, with no surprises when you know mechanics. Thanks to share for the casu/newbies, that will help the dev to create an awesome game.

I want to love this game so much. I have about 40 hours into it but the amount of micro-management involved is just insane.

You made me think of something. I think the market place bug is when you delete plots while you are building others. I think the market places loses count of the total plots and this and starts spewing sub 100% numbers and a total delete and rebuild of the market place is what resets the plot count correct. And thus fixes the problem.

Some of the profit margins on trade don't make sense to me. A lot of the more refined items export for either a loss or just break even. Swords, for example, require two iron slabs (each worth 4 gold) and only sell for 8 total. Linen and dyes export for 4, but clothes only export for 6 (net loss of 2). It seems better to sell the mid-tier items rather than waste labor and logistics that seem to add little if any value.

The best video made yet for Manor Lords.

What a great video, even after 100h myself there is still a lot to learn. During the manual farming part, at 1:54:21, you said it is impossible to harvest during september if you don't want certain fields to get tapped. Wouldn't an option be to just decrease the priority for those fields during that specific month, so workers can go for the fields you want first and then pause production?

awesome tips my man :) my main issue is making a prety layout, im really bad at designing things like this and i usually end up making a mess and everything is just plopped down randomly

The best guide out there. Period.

We are all playing checkers. Strat is on a different level

Only managed to play 10hrs in the last 2 weeks, but really enjoying the game so far and excited to see where its going

Ok heres something I think nobody has talked about and that's using Manor forts for combat. How the hell do you use guard towers on the walls? Can you man them with archer units? What's the most effective way of building a forts walls (Round vs Boxy)? How does enemy AI handle having 1 maybe 2 entrances can they cheese and clip through the wall? Can the player cheese the system and make bigger forts/walled cities without mods?

Something i havent seen mentioned is that getting double pop growth requires having >75% approval at the START of the month, when all the current month approval modifiers have reset to 0. As far as i can tell you can only get double pop growth when your "previous" modifiers have accumulated to at least +25-26

Thanks for the great video. Much appreciated. So far, i have only minor questions left. What is the benefit of assigning a family to a stable? For selling goods via trade route: Is it sufficient to have the goods in a store house or do they have to be in the trade post? And how to get them in there? I have never seen you working on linen or wool. Is it sufficient for clothing to just have leather and shoes?

46:37 When the AI do his 1st claim in the winter before the 2nd year, one must have at least 350 treasury for the mercs to keep them for 2 months at least, and a full unit of 36 spearmen, with helmets too, cause the AI comes with two armies with 36 retinue and several other mercs in each, one in the first month and one a bit later, so you need at least 4-5 strong infantry units and probably few archers and few thugs to deal with their archers and thugs.

As a brand new player this is an amazingly helpful video, thank you. In your section with the starting build order you mentioned that you just throw everything up wherever to get everything established and then move things after to better organize. When you move houses around I assume you need to delete and rebuild, do the people that lost their house automatically go and occupy the new houses?

Thank you ! 👍👍

in this video it is shown that for the automated farm rotation with 1 farmhouse and 1 worker to set 3 .6 morgan fields. any idea how big you can go per field if you have heavy plow perk and an ox stationed there? or would that cause you to add more fields since the ox will "scare" people off of the field it is working?

Strat for game mechanics + tacticat for designs and cheese

350 hours already?? Man youre the grind king

Thank you strat!

do you leave the foragers in the forager hut during the winter? and what if you are growing Herbs.? Do you leave someone there to grow the herbs/

The issue I have with specialized granaries and storehouses is the AI completely ignoring the do not accept list and taking in random bits of bullshit. For instance I have a storehouse that is part of my logging setup set to only accept planks charcoal and firewood but will randomly fill up with leather .

In regards to Max difficulty, I've actually found it more helpful to build 2 family plots because they require less resources (firewood) to maintain and are easily upgradeable.

Hey, Strat, I'm trying my hand at Manor Lords for the first time so am just using relaxed mode with not battles at present. Can you do a video on how you can make a prosperous town without the bandits and battles, please? I am an older player and want to get into this game fully eventually, but just need some tips for it in relaxed mode. I've watched your videos and others so know the basics, just would like to see it in action in this mode like you did so well in this video.

46:58 instead of waiting for the units to run all the way to town, its seems better to disband them right away when they are in your region. Then rally them again, and they will teleport to your town. Then disband again asap. This way you dont have to wait for them to run all the way to your town.

how'd you get the spearman @ 45:31 equipped? By default you dont have any spears right?

how do you manage the filter in store houses and granaries to work? if i set up that f.e. only beer is accepted, it will just be ignored and i'll have all kind of food stored. same issue in store houses.

If you have mutiple farmhouses producing wheat, shouldn't you have a granary for wheat only right next to the windmill? For barley and flax we are out of luck, because storehouses don't pick them up (bug), but you can have a malthouse and weaver per farmhouse and then a storehouse (with malt only) next to brewery and another one close to the market and tailor (with dyes, wool, and linen).

Great video Strat! I just have only 1 question: are you sure that the markets don't have a range because it feels that the houses at the extremities of the town are having the issues. Thank you for your service!

Hi, great video. Do you plan to make a tutorial how to move from the initial starting village to the town at the optimal location. How to move the families and all the stuff from the starting location? And when? 😮

Ok so about the traps development point. Traps themselves are set randomly somewhere on the map. I thought it was just that specific region but I recently saw a video where someone watched their trappers wander out into another nearby region to trap. Furthermore, some of those trappers ended up taking extremely poor pathing back and walked all the way around to the nearest roads, usually the king's road. This was able to be worked around a bit by having some extensive roads in whatever region one could build in, allowing such wayward trappers to have an easier journey back. The main reason I wanted to talk more about traps is to refute your claim made in the video. You said that once the trap is set that the food income is passive. This is not the case, any such set trap must be harvested from at some point after it's set. It seems to be able to be harvested by any hunter, so not specifically the ones that set the traps originally. With this fact, and given the amount of distance we are talking to set them in the first place, I think it's a pretty horrible loss to one's early production to take this dev point. Later on it might be not as harmful, but I can't see wanting to have it right off the bat. Just watch them as they go out to set or run back to harvest. It's painful how far they go!!! All that being said, I still want to test traps further myself. If one can set the work limit on the camps and have the hunters stick to desireable and designated areas, this could be an incredible source of meat. All I know is that at one point when I was testing it around the third year or so, I found something interesting. I had wanted to see what would happen with multiple fully assigned hunting camps and I was astonished to find that 5 camps gathered like 200-300+ meat from one "hunting session". I hadn't been able to find any info on the timing for traps, so I just waited until the local deer had repopulated to max before sending the wave of hunters out. Mind you, this was with both the traps and the extra meat development points, and the double growth rate from the one policy. Not sure it would be worth all that investment tbh. Anyways, I hope some of my rambling is helpful. Sorry to be that "well actually" guy, but I think it should have been made clearer for folks. ^_^

Strat - if you cheese the mines in a pyramid shape you can fit 3 per deposit

Question about wild animals. If you ceep higher amount of them they will breed faster? Or it dont change meat production?

@strat-guides at 32:56 you mention that 1 grain->2 flour and 1 flour->1 bread. But I think using bakeries instead of communal ovens it transforms 1 flour->2 bread, which is much more efficient at the cost of not being able to re-assign the baker families.

I currently have 60hrs in Manor Lords and I have a couple of questions: 1. Some of my food isnt being sold in the market even though the granary is directly across the street. Like, i have 15 burgage plots, 600+ vegetables, but only 9 is reaching the market. 2. During the end game, my market keeps getting filled with empty stalls, pretty soon the workers will demand more market spaces. Do i have to keep demolishing the empty stalls or am i doing something wrong? 3. On a different save, i was trying to get the "The Merchant" achievement, the land had terrible fertility so i had to resort to honey and trading. I also got the foreign supplies perk just so i have a steady supply of bread, but once i built it, it would only store 5 bread and be permanently abandoned. Is this a bug?

Would love to see you attempt the retinue only challenge. It seems super hard to do. and if you want to go one step more masochistic do retinue only, no trade. GOOD LUCK. I have been trying but I couldnt do it, my bottleneck is the early game. I manage with kiting the enemies but eventually I fail under the problem of the bigger bandit raid.