Burgage Plots is the main residential building in Manor Lords, with three tiers available for upgrades. Each time you upgrade the building you will get more Regional Wealth income from the families inside them, alongside ticking up the meters to reach the next settlement level, the main gameplay loop. Therefore, upgrading burgage plots is something you should be doing. Here’s everything you need to know to upgrade burgage plots and how to best prepare for them using the tips and calculations we’ve come to.

Leveling Up Burgage Plots¶

To upgrade burgage plots, you will need to meet the criteria for progressing each building. You can see a table below that shows the requirements for each burgage plot level up requirement and criteria.

When you build a burgage plot, it will default to level 1. You now need to ensure you have a marketplace in range and supplied often enough to provide one source of food and fuel. You will also need a wooden church in the settlement. Once those are hit, then you will then unlock the next settlement level, and then start working towards level 2 burgage plots.

Be careful of the lack of fuel at marketplace warning you get. It’s something that happens a lot if you don’t have enough supply of firewood or logistic workers in place.

Level 2 Burgage Plots¶

When you’ve got a level 2 burgage plot, you now need:

• Clothing stalls - Providing basic clothing materials like leather, linen and yarn
• Two sources of food.

This is a sign that you’re progressing with basic resources. Basic clothing stalls require any of the following:

• Wool
• Yarn
• Leather

Wool comes from sheep farms, presuming you’ve got sheep livestock from the livestock trading hub. you can then get a weaver’s workshop to make wool into yarn. This is also needed to turn flax you grow into linen. You can also get leather from a tannery, which requires hides from goat shed extensions or from hunting camps.

As for the food, this list contains all the food you can get in Manor Lords:

• Apples - Requires apple orchard research
• Berries - Foragers hut - grows seasonally in the wild
• Bread - Requires Flour, made from wheat or rye grains at a windmill. Take the flour to a communal oven or a bakery extension to make bread.
• Eggs - Requires a basic burgage plot extension
• Honey - Requires the honey technology unlocked and you produce special bee hives under the farming section of research.
• Meat - Gathered via hunting camps hunting wild animals, passive meat trap technology, and goat shed extensions.
• Vegetables - Requires a basic burgage plot extension. The bigger the extension size the better for vegetable output.
  • We have a more in-depth guide on farming in Manor Lords if you’re interested in learning more.

Once all requirements are met at the burgage plot, you can press the upgrade button, which takes four pieces of Lumber to upgrade it to level 2.

Level 3 Burgage Plots¶

To reach level 3, you now need:

• A level 2 church
• A tavern with a constant supply of ale
• Three sources of food
• Two sources of clothing, featuring a material, and either cloak, clothes, or shoes

Upgrading the church is fairly easy. You need to create roof tiles using clay at its industry-related building. Everything else you should be able to get easily. Set some spare workers to mine around 150 clay and then get them to make rooftiles. You’ll need them for later anyway. Spend some at the church and stockpile the rest for level 3 burgage plot upgrade costs.

From there, another source of food is a must. You likely already have this covered with variations in burgage plot extensions of food, and perhaps now importing other food sources too.

You should also now be attempting to get either cloaks, clothes or shoes crafted at tailors or cobblers artisan extension at a level 2 burgage plot. The one you want to make depends on if you’ve been focusing on wool, linen or hides. Look at what you are getting a decent supply of to the markets already for level 2 tasks. From there decide on the cobbler’s workshop for leather shoes, or linen and yarn + dyes for cloaks or clothes.

Now, the final part is the tavern. Taverns require a constant supply of ale to be considered active for burgage plots in town. There are a few things to consider here for taverns and ale supply:

• Multiply your population by 0.2-0.35 to get an estimation of the monthly ale consumption of your settlement
• Brewers on average produce around 13 ale a month per family working at the brewery.
• A single-family working a malthouse can serve around 3-4 brewers effectively.
• Multiply your monthly ale consumption by 12 to get the range of barley you need to produce a year. This is how much barley you need to grow and or buy to placate the alcoholics in your settlement.
  • We have a more in-depth tavern guide here so you can learn everything there is to know.

Once you can supply a tavern consistently, then you can upgrade your burgage plots to level 3. You will need:

• 4x roof tiles
• 25 Regional Wealth
• 8x planks
• 4x logs to upgrade them.

Maintaining Level 3 Burgage Plots¶

Once you upgrade to Level 3 burgage plots, you now need to maintain their standards. It’s the same as upgrading to level 3, albeit you need four sources of food. Again, that means covering all three food extension types across lots of burgage plots. It also means getting berries, and maybe even unlocking honey, apple orchards, and maintaining bread and berry supplies when possible.

This is much easier to do if you invest deep into a settlement’s farming technology, as you can hit near enough all food sources passively. There are likely four sources available at all times. The only time this isn’t a thing is when you grew too much and your food stockpiles are getting annihilated fairly quickly. Consider spamming burgage plots to grow veg, get eggs and meats in that case and trading for foods when possible. You likely have a decent cash flow to afford food purchases fairly often to keep your citizens happy.