Manor Lords is a new city management game taking place in a medieval setting, and one important aspect of it is learning to grow food for your busy peasants. In this guide, we will try to give you a few tips to help with your food management and hopefully keep your people well-fed and content with their lives.
Complete Food Guide
Just in case you need help with the bare basics, what you have to know about food is that each burgage plot will consume 1 unit of food per month. You can check when your supplies will run out by hovering over the barrel icon on the top of the screen.
At the start of the game, your main source of this will mainly be both the hunting camp and forager hut. Both of these can be found under the gathering tab indicated by a tree icon.
In addition to that, make sure that you build a granary as well so you can actually safely store all of your goods. Don’t forget to assign at least one family for all of these structures, or else they won’t actually do anything.
Some players believe that specific food is consumed randomly by each plot, so diversity may not matter too much in this regard.
Some General Tips
When starting off, make sure to build your marketplace close to your house plots, and keep it somewhat small for now since you won’t be needing an excess of stalls early on. This is where your villagers will be getting their food and fuel.
In addition to that, make sure to have a diverse selection of food. Again, starting out, you will achieve this with the hunting camp and forager hut, but depending on the seasons and animal population, there will be times where these become ineffective sources of food.
Some players have done a bit of testing and concluded that it is generally better to keep your worker’s camp at the start of the game due to how little families will consume while in it. However, if you are having issues with unhappiness, feel free to destroy it in favor of burgage plots.
Unoccupied Houses
On the topic of burgage plots, it should be noted that empty ones can reportedly affect how food is distributed among your people.
For example, if you have empty lots in between the market and occupied houses, it can supposedly lead to a lot of unhappy people until this unusual issue is resolved.
So keep that in mind when building up your village. Check out our guide on how to maximize market coverageif you need some help with regards to your town’s layout.
Food variety needs can be particularly difficult to deal with when playing on a harder difficulty level, so adjust your production strategy accordingly.
Generally, you may want to have your storehouses placed right next to your marketplace. This will make it easier to restock the market, though early access woes may still result in unfulfilled needs.
Chicken Coops
Chicken coops built on level 1 burgage plots can be a fantastic way of passively producing food early on, especially if you are struggling with variety. Each of these produce 1 egg per month, but this adds up if you have multiple of them.
It should be noted that the size of a chicken coop supposedly does not have an effect on its production, so keep these structures small to avoid wasting any space.
Vegetable Gardens
Another alternative to chicken coops are vegetable gardens, which can also be built on the backyard extensions of burgage plots. Unlike the former, these are affected by their size, but you will have to decide whether more yield is worth the slower production speed.
These are also more active compared to producing eggs, and families that are assigned elsewhere will undoubtedly take longer to tend to their gardens. Keep these small during the early game stages.
One strategic method of using them is by having the families who have them be assigned simpler tasks. This will give them ample time to work on crop production back at their homes.
Apple orchards are also worth making early on, particularly because they take years to grow. This will help you address issues with food variety and sourcing later on, if you last long enough to take advantage of them.
Apple production will require a development point allocated into Orchardry, and some have noted how effective these can be in double plots.
Making Bread – Rye Over Wheat
Producing bread is a long-winded process that requires a ton of labor, but it adds to your food variety, so you will likely have to make or trade for some eventually.
If you do insist on making your own bread, just keep in mind that there are many processes involved. Whether or not this is worth it for your current build is up to you.
Here is the summarized process of creating your own bread:
- First, you need a field that is yielding either wheat or rye.
- Next, you must have a farmhouse in order to turn wheat or rye into grain
- After that, a windmill is required to turn grain into flour
- Finally, you need to have a communal oven or bakery extension (at level 2 burgage plots) to bake the flour into bread.
If you choose to go down this path, rye is typically regarded as a better option overall as it is a viable crop to grow even in places with low fertility.
And those are just some of the things you need to know when it comes to food production in the game, with many more mechanics and options to explore! While you are here, go and check out our guide on how to upgrade houses in Manor Lords as well so you can start getting better infrastructure and more.
