Updated on 10th May with the Patch Notes for the first patch, which is now in experimental beta.
Slavic Magic will release numerous patches in 2024 as Manor Lords progresses through Early Access and approaches its full 1.0 release. Let’s keep track of these updates and share our thoughts on each patch.
Greg Styczeń, the solo developer behind Manor Lords, has announced that the first patch will be released soon. He has also shared some details about the changes it will include.
Manor Lords Patch Notes and Release Date
A few key changes will come with the first patch for Manor Lords, which Styczeń says will fix the homeless problem, where residents and your settlement population don’t take up empty houses.
As many of you have probably noticed, archer damage is currently quite weak, which is a response to feedback from the beta where they were significantly overpowered. Consequently, Styczeń reduced their power too much, making them far too weak. Styczeń has acknowledged the mistake and says it will be fixed in the first patch.
This mod will allow you to x2 DMG for the Warbow if you want a quick fix before the next patch releases.
Each type of good now features a switch that allows players to disable trading with Free Merchants/Tradepoints if they prefer to trade exclusively with another region. The import price displayed will dynamically adjust to show the lowest available price or indicate “NA” if no goods of that type are available anywhere.
Here are the expected patch notes for the update, which should hopefully arrive in May. You can test it open beta now, using an experimental branch.
- Major changes:
- The King's Tax (or Annual Royal Tax) is now enabled. This tax is collected annually from all players (main player and AI) and goes to your liege. It's counted per population and should counterbalance players who hoard wealth despite having non-optimized economies.
- For now, players can go into debt without consequence, but future updates will introduce penalties such as losing the king's favor, and for repeat offenders, the king's army will appear as enemies.
- Global/Local trade switch for trading posts:
- Players can now switch trade to "local only" at trading posts for each type of good to facilitate exchanges between their own regions while ignoring free merchants.
- Two trading posts (both regions) are still required to make this work.
- Traders will prioritize traveling to locations with the best prices, which may include regions owned by other Lords. This could lead to interesting consequences in the future. For now, transport distance calculations have been adjusted to make trader destinations more predictable.
- Regional wealth is still required for exchanging goods between regions with a trading post, maintaining the independence of regional economies, which provides a more realistic economic simulation.
- Gameplay & balance:
- People now randomly pick a food resource to consume instead of eating in a specific order. [Experimental]
- Fertility is no longer depleted after crop growth reaches 100%, making micromanaging early harvests less necessary. Yield may still increase beyond 100% if the maximum yield isn't reached. [Experimental]
- Crops are now added directly to the field inventory instead of the villager's inventory when harvested to prevent harvesting walk times from being a bottleneck, especially for large fields. [Experimental]
- Oxen plowing is prioritized over transporting resources back to the granary and warehouse to reduce unnecessary travel. [Experimental]
- Plowing shed now adds two livestock worker slots.
- The rate at which the Baron claims regions has been lowered and adjusted to better reflect game settings.
- Removed the worker camp upgrade; it was intended for colony regions and will be re-added when they are properly implemented.
- Food producing residential plots no longer stockpile their produce before sharing with the marketplace.
- Sawpit log storage space increased to 5.
- When establishing a trade route, merchants no longer spawn only at the nearest trade point. Instead, they are distributed to various trade points to make building trading posts on the edge of the region less optimal. [Experimental]
- Warbows' ranged attack increased from 4 to 12.
- "Trade logistics" development branch now reduces the cost of new trade routes by 50% instead of capping it at 25. [Experimental]
- The cost of opening new trade routes now scales exponentially with each opened route. [Experimental]
- Base cost of opening a trade route increased from 12 to 20 (before the good value multiplier). [Experimental]
- When the market is oversupplied, players can still export goods, albeit at a much lower price. [Experimental]
- The price multiplier for oversupplied goods is now 0.75x for oversupplied and 0.5x for critically oversupplied. [Experimental]
- The rate at which the market becomes oversupplied no longer depends on the value of goods, as this penalized high-value trade routes. Oversupply rates are now equal for all good types. [Experimental]
- The "Better deals" development branch now reduces the foreign import tariff by 50% instead of removing it completely. [Experimental]
- Ale consumption reduced by 75% (around 1/3 per family per month). [Experimental]
- Building placement steepness limits have been made harsher because trading posts and churches often looked awkward on very steep slopes. [Experimental]
- Soldiers no longer trigger the "unburied bodies" approval factor when corpses are in their proximity.
- The hitching post is free again, reducing the chances of players getting stuck without an ox or hitching post and unable to order an ox. [Experimental]
- Minor changes:
- Applied the "mindfulness" system, initially designed for the oxen, to the free merchants to reduce clumps and traffic jams.
- Moved the location of trades further off the map to ensure there is space for all the trade wagons even if players place the trading post right on the edge of the map.
- If a trading post is clogged, traders are allowed to make transactions without entering the shed, as long as they are within the general building bounds.
- Changed default AA under DX11 to TAA. [Experimental]
- Added a spatialization update call when recruits are sneakily teleported home when rallied to ensure collisions are properly calculated after teleportation.
- Added a check for idle villagers to avoid them hanging around the graveyard for random conversation since it looked weird.
- Made "is close to camera" value update on setting follow mode to ensure the game doesn't optimize animations or sound effects thinking the character is still far from the camera.
- Disabled fire damage for people who have water buckets and are actively firefighting, and reduced the fire damage amount.
- When all resource visualization slots are "filled", villagers will transport to a random one instead of the first one found. This ensures less traffic jams, for instance, at the churchyard if all graves are "full" already.
- Firefighting villagers will now ignore anti-clogging behavior (waiting their turn at narrow pathfinding points).
- Added a "mourning period left" UI element in the residential panel to display how many days of mourning are left until the burgage plot can bring in more family members again.
- Added a mourning icon to the building floater.
- Made sure the mourning period is properly added to save data.
- After continuing the game after a victory, the camera should go back to the player's main region instead of levitating over the map edge.
- Disabled the ability to quicksave during the game over/victory cinematic. [Experimental]
- Disabled the ability to manually save the game after being defeated and added a tooltip explaining why saves are disabled.
- Disabled quick save and auto-save if the game was lost.
- When an ox gathers a log, it will prioritize immediately bringing it to the sawpit before bringing it to the logging camp unless construction reserve forbids it.
- Improved marketplace logistics efficiency and optimization.
- Tuned the AI retreat distances in an attempt to reduce how often its archers get into the loop of attack-retreat.
- Added the missing trading post building thumbnail.
- Minor unit in-town pathfinding updates.
- Swapped the old UE4 destructible system for a new, UE5 friendly, chaos-based debris system. For now, it's just used for chopped firewood cutter logs.
- Further tweaks to properly choose the right default AA/upscaler during the first time launch correctly for specific GPUs (e.g., RTX properly defaulting to DLSS).
- Added kings tax rate multiplier to the game setup settings.
- Due to a mismatch in global market supply stock values, old saves (from builds 0.7.954-0.7.956) will have their market supply reset on loading.
- Due to changes in how food is consumed, a popup "Food consumed" may no longer appear if a building is selected while food is being consumed from inventory. [Experimental]
- Made the sheep flock a bit more closely together to look more like a herd. [Experimental]
- Steepness limits no longer apply when placing rally points.
- Players can now rally their militia on fields and pastures.
- Trading posts will now display a price range for imports in case they can buy it both from other regions and from foreign trade sources.
- Increased the sheep & lamb collision radius.
- Capped the number of workers who supply a single market stall at the same time to 2 to reduce markets getting completely clogged with the new upped market supply frequency.
- Further optimized the market supply functions to make late-game towns run smoother.
- Optimized the function that searches for a friend to do idle tasks with (like conversations).
- Optimized the door opening animations.
- Increased the precision when checking whether a character is inside a building on fire and should take damage.
- Unified the currency icon in the mercenary company panel to make it clearer that you're paying with treasury and not regional wealth.
- Added accommodation call after fire is started and turns people homeless so that they can be reaccommodated to other available burgage plots immediately.
- Since almost all families have more than one family member, I made the "workplace/reassign" buttons aligned vertically instead of horizontally in the family list.
- Fixed old fonts being used in the family entry widgets.
- Crash fixes:
- Fixed a crash when doing a sequence of livestock import, export, and import, because "home" wasn't cleared properly during export, and the same animal was reimported.
- Fixed a rare crash if a handcart fails to spawn, probably if the trading post was built so that part of it crosses the map edge.
- Fix crash on startup if OpenXr sdk is installed.
- Bug fixes:
- Fixed victory status not resetting after starting a new game, leading to a game over screen not appearing if the player lost/won multiple games without turning the game off.
- Fixed crop transports not accounting for the farm work area.
- Fixed crops dying in the winter instead of actually increasing yield by absorbing nutrients from the snow as it was intended for winter crops.
- Fixed oxen sometimes "ghost plowing" a field when they are waiting on their guide.
- Fixed plow and ox sometimes misaligning on 12x game speed.
- Fixed farm workers not accounting for oxen plowing the farms in some situations, leading to a lot of unnecessary collisions on the field.
- Fixed crop rotation unplowing the fields.
- Fixed disbanded mercenary group becoming immediately available again after save/load cycle.
- Fixed the trading post export transactions not moving regional wealth between the regions correctly if owned by the same lord.
- Fixed paused taverns fulfilling the entertainment requirement.
- Fix attempt for never-ending fires if a fire was triggered after the building was already on fire.
- Fixed problem banners not erasing after an entity gets erased (for instance an animal runs away and leaves a "not enough pasture space" banner).
- Fixed "update task" sometimes triggering before a character gets assigned their region.
- Fixed livestock sometimes being unaccommodated after order even though there is stable or pasture space due to being transferred to the region twice (once when buying and once when livestock merchant brings it to the building).
- Fixed livestock traders trading between on-map regions possibly sometimes paying twice because the ownership changing function was called both on pickup of livestock and on dropoff.
- Fixed the game getting stuck on the game summary screen infinitely after winning or losing the game.
- Fixed "none" people populating the town after a raid sometimes who just stand around waiting forever and possibly crash the game while reloading.
- Fixed the blurry desktop icon.
- Fixed the save/load menu header not translating after changing the language.
- Fixed dead animals triggering the mourning period in burgage plots, halting growth.
- Fixed mourning period halting homeless accommodation.
- Fixed migration/growth of family members ignoring the 30 day mourning period sometimes.
- Fixed the game getting stuck after you click "continue in sandbox" until any main tab is pressed.
- Fixed the front lighting not being visible in the retinue editor if bounced light approximation is turned to low or off.
- Fixed floating feedback text spawning during the cinematic mode.
- Fixed auto-save triggering during the cinematic mode.
- Fixed "storage full" triggering for wrong buildings sometimes (for example sawpit having 1/1 logs).
- Fix attempt for oxen bringing too many logs to the sawpit and crossing the storage limit.
- Fixed free merchants sometimes getting stuck if a trading post was built so close to the edge that a portion of it was outside of any region bounds.
- Fixed horse wagon rotations getting a bit too wonky on slopes.
- Fixed a bug where a unit could no longer move due to being forever stuck in "waiting for pathfinding to finish" if another unit with a lower squadID got completely destroyed.
- Fixed the wrong yarn basket carrying animation.
- Fixed traders not importing from on-map regions even though the price is better than buying from trade points.
- Fixed farm workers & farm oxen stealing planks from fields which are getting "fenced up."
- Fixed "homeless" problem banner not disappearing after upgrading homeless camp to a worker camp.
- Fixed animals not getting removed from stable space / pasture space after death.
- Fixed animal corpses not disappearing over time.
- Added a dirty fix for families moving into homes but not registering correctly and not displaying in the UI, leading to a "secret" family living in one of the burgage plots. The reason is still unknown and being investigated.
- Cosmetics:
- Added a new patron saint banner graphics: St Maurice.
- Added a carried dead body visualization.
- Made debris piles align to ground slope.
- Fixed the throw torch animation ending abruptly.
- New upgraded retinue helmet variation: Pointy bascinet.
- Fixed the armor clipping through the leg of the upgraded retinue puffy sleeve jupon body variation.
- New upgraded retinue body variation: Coat of plates.
- New upgraded retinue helmet variation: Hounskull bascinet with a gilded cover.
- Increased location precision for animals standing in the stables.
- Fixed the praying animation.
- Fixed the wrong door orientation for LV2 cottage variation B (with a planked gable).
- Adjusted the two-handed weapon default idle pose to have a more natural stance.
- New militia helmet variation - banded bascinet with a mail aventail.
- Fixed some mail armor variants clipping with helmets on T3 militia units (militia mail will get their own unique variations soon).
- Reworked lv2 granary model with proper animated doors.
It’s funny that the Sawpit efficiency was mentioned, as there’s a mod you can download that will sort this problem out. Grab it from our database of recommended mods. You can increase the Garrison Limit too.
GameWatcher’s Patch Release Date Estimation: May 2024.
Styczeń is a smooth operator, so we think the first patch will arrive soon - likely sometime this month.
Haven’t picked up Manor Lords yet? You can grab it from Humble Store, but before you do, make sure you check out our early access review. You can also find out about the Roadmap for 2024 here.
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