Gold is a crucial resource in Manor Lords, necessary for establishing a flourishing economy, hiring mercenary armies to defend against raiders or invading lords, and obtaining most of the game’s materials. In Manor Lords, gold translates to Regional Wealth and your Treasury.
Several strategies can be implemented to build Regional Wealth, enabling you to amass substantial income for your settlement.
You can use taxation to boost your Treasury, but the main currency is known as Regional Wealth, and you will get most of it via the Trading Post, by selling weapons or equipment.
How to Start and Make Money Quick in Manor Lords
Regional Wealth enables you to import goods, purchase animals such as oxs and horses for your stables and trading posts, and fund upgrades for houses and buildings.
When you’re just beginning, the best way to generate income in Manor Lords is by making sure one of the first buildings you build is the Trading Post. Planks and Firewood are abundant as they are renewable resources and easy to produce. Although they sell for a modest amount, trading these resources is an excellent strategy to kickstart your early economy.
Once you begin expanding you will want to start upgrading your houses, referred to as Burgage Plots. Each upgrade to a higher tier increases the amount of gold earned per family: Tier 2 yields one piece of gold per family, and Tier 3 provides two.
Before upgrading your houses to higher tiers, it’s important to increase your population by maintaining a balance of houses across different tiers. You cannot upgrade all houses at once; instead, you must construct a specific number of lower-tier houses and keep them before you can progress to higher-tier settlements and houses.
Once you’ve established a stable economy and constructed the necessary buildings in the early game, you can begin producing Shoes at the Cobbler’s Workshop and Warbows at the Bowyer’s Workshop. Selling these items at the Trading Post will boost your wealth, as Shoes yield 8 gold and Warbows 5 gold each.
Shoes and Warbows are among the easiest material goods to produce because they rely on renewable resources. Regardless of the random starting location you end up with, you will always have the resources required for these materials close by. Setting up production and sales of Shoes and Warbows should be a priority. Once you begin, you can continue selling these items right through to the endgame.
Warbows can be crafted with just one plank, whereas Shoes require two pieces of leather. You can obtain leather by setting up Goat Sheds in your houses and with Hunting Camps, then processing the materials into leather.
Don’t be concerned about the apparent loss in selling Shoes made from leather; although 2 pieces of leather can sell for 12 gold and Shoes sell for only 8 gold, consider the logistics.
Your traders need to manually transport goods to the Trading Posts, which takes considerable time. Therefore, it’s more efficient to focus on selling higher-priced items. At this stage, exporting Planks and Firewood should be paused. It’s impractical to have your workers transport such low-value items across the map when they could be handling more lucrative goods.
It’s important to remember that your home region can trade only through the single available export route. We recommend constructing your entire town based on the location of your Export Point and Trading Posts. Position these facilities as close to the export point as possible, and then develop your town around or behind this area.
Build the houses that you’ll later upgrade to workshops very close to your Trading Posts, and add Storage between them. If you put them all on top of each other, you will have the perfect and most efficient trade flow.
Build multiple Trading Posts next to each other and staff them as soon as feasible. Make sure to buy Horses for every Trading Post and set them as permanently stationed inside (via the Advanced tab when highlighting a trading post). It takes a long time for your traders to head out and sell the goods, so you’ll want to put all the care into making sure this is set correctly.
The market also appears to operate on a demand-based system, although it’s challenging to determine what’s in demand at any given time. To circumvent this, and not wait for outside traders to trade with you, build plenty of your own Trading Posts, and send those traders out! Having 2-3 Trading Posts fully staffed with people and horses is a good mid-game goal. Later on, you’ll want to expand to 4-5 Trading Posts for the end game.
Trading Posts are the key to maximising profits in Manor Lords. The items you choose to produce and sell will largely depend on the resources available in your starting region. Here’s a list of recommended items to focus on, tailored to the resources you may find locally:
| Goods | Regional Wealth Earned |
|---|---|
| Firewood (very early game) | 1 |
| Planks (very early game) | 2 |
| Warbow (early to end game) | 5 |
| Shoes (early to end game) | 8 |
| Rooftiles (mid to end game) | 8 |
| Tools (mid to end game) | 8 |
| All Weapons, Shields & Armor (mid to end game) | 5-8 |
How do you increase your Treasury Cash Flow in Manor Lords?
In Manor Lords, Treasury and Regional Wealth represent two distinct sources of income, each relating to different aspects of the game. While you cannot transfer funds between them, they each play a unique role in your strategy.
The Treasury is crucial for hiring mercenaries to protect your settlement from bandits and raiding lords. It is also necessary for settling in new regions once you’ve built the Manor House. While you can increase taxes within your manor to boost your Treasury, it’s important to monitor your approval ratings among the villagers to maintain stability.
You can also boost your Treasury by attacking and destroying Brigand camps, which are scattered across the map, each yielding between 100-200 gold. Additionally, you can use diplomacy to demand money from other lords if you are cunning enough to persuade them to accept your demands.
We will continue to see how both these elements develop during the early access phase and if Slavic Magic makes any changes to how the economy works, we will keep you posted.
You can learn more about its roadmap plans for 2024 and see if it’s coming to the PlayStation 5 once you’re done reading our guide. Manor Lords will be available on the Humble Store on the 26th of April.
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