All city management games have that one early game challenge, survive. Manor Lords’ early game is no different with your very first task being to survive the first year. From a few settlers you have to prepare your settlement with firewood, fuel, and living spaces. We have a build order to help you survive the first year that will take you to preparing for the second year.

Surviving Your First Year¶

Okay, so, you have a few priorities to work on. We recommend you start your playthrough by doing the following:

1. Build a Logging Camp
2. Build a Forager’s Hut
3. Build a Hunter’s Camp
4. Build a Woodcutter’s Lodge
5. Start slowly building burgage plots when your approval rating is above 50%
6. Build a Forester’s Hut
7. Throw spare population into logistics like the warehouse, granary or ox post and woodcutters to better prepare for winter
8. Build a small marketplace to prepare food and fuel stalls near residential buildings

Your first four tasks are very important for setting up your logistics and economy. A logging camp will get you started with getting the lumber you need to produce the other buildings on this list. Furthermore, they’ll slowly start wracking up lumber, ready for your future burgage plot to get your homeless citizens out of the tents and into housing.

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In the first year of Manor Lords, you will rely on the forest to set up your city-building needs and survive the first winter.

From there, start building a forager’s hut and a hunting camp immediately after. Employ one family to work the hunting camp and forager’s hut near the wild animals and wild berries. Ensure you don’t drive the berries growing zone or wild animal living area way. Controlling how many animals you kill at the hunting camp is important, you should cap it at around eight remaining animals for now.

The other task you have is to build a woodcutters lodge. This should start prepping your firewood ready for your first winter. Winter doubles the amount of fuel you use, so getting the stockpiles ready early is extremely important.

Now you should have one family spare for the workforce. Use this worker to gradually start building burgage plots using the lumber your logging camp is getting you. Build the five you need to house all starting families, and then a few more burgage plots to encourage more families and population growth. Your approval rating should be decent enough to encourage population growth to a degree.

When you get a few more citizens, build a forester’s hut and employ one family to start regrowing the trees around the logging camp and woodcutters to ensure they don’t creep into wild berry or wild animal zones.

With your spare families, continue to build a few more burgage plots and leave it for the year. Add the extra families to the woodcutters so you can get as much fuel as possible, and any spares anywhere else. From there, embrace winter and survive it.

Planning for Year 2¶

Presuming you’ve got too many families eating through fuel and food stockpiles you should make it. Now the challenge is to prepare for your second winter. We recommend the following strategies:

1. Take excess population out of the woodcutters and logistics into building
2. Build a farmhouse
3. Put spare population into the farmhouse and make a wheat field about 1.5 Morgan in size
4. Build a windmill using spare population before September
5. Build a communal oven before September
6. Build a church
7. Slowly build more burgage plots while you are producing more food and fuel than you’re using to get more population
8. Place spare population into the windmill and communal oven temporarily to produce bread
9. Any other spare population goes back into logistics and woodcutting over winter

From there, use the spare population to build a Farmhouse and a field. Use the field to grow wheat on a very fertile Emmer zone and set it to around 1.5 Morgan in size. Let the farmers plow the field and then harvest in September. When September comes, make sure you have a windmill built and a communal oven ready to make bread.

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You’ll gradually want to start building more burgage plots when you have medium approval to encourage natural population growth for upcoming projects.

While preparing for the second winter, keep doing what you do in the first year. Also, start building a church, and get planks prepared at a sawmill with your spare lumber. Now continue building burgage plots until you reach medium village size. From there, follow the checklist using spare population for burgage plots to level your houses up. This will give you some technology to start specializing your settlement into a playstyle you want to try. You should then start diversifying your farms, and other industries to start upgrading burgage plots and get better building levels to unlock expansions for further refining.

It is worth mentioning that by year 2 bandits can start spawning. Make sure to have a bowyers expansion in one burgage plot to start making archers in case you need to defend yourself early. You can read more about armaments here.

This concludes the basics of surviving your first few years in Manor Lords and getting the basics steady for the challenges ahead.