Hi everyone,

Localization was updated, and judging from reports from QA and Discord, the latest Beta looks stable enough to be brought to the Main branch. From the looks of things, the next update will come relatively soon and will contain a pathfinding refactor with multiple optimizations + multiple bugfixes and some balance tweaks. After that, the current plan is to do an update to the construction process (including a new church level), and then we're back to the development of Perks.

We'd really appreciate it if you could take a moment to leave a Steam review. As we're working hard on the next update, fixing bugs, and adding new features, we'd love to hear what you think about Manor Lords. Your feedback, opinions, and support all help us know what to focus on, improve, and add to Manor Lords. Even if it's a few sentences about how you feel about the latest update, it'd be a great help to the team and me.

• New Burgage Plot Level: Added a new Burgage Plot Level (now introduced as Level 3), complete with new models, requirements and effects.

• Rearranged Order: Moved the previous Burgage Plot Level 3 aesthetic to Level 4, and updated requirements and effects.

• Extension Requirements: Cobbler and Baker extension now require the Plot to be Level 3 to unlock.

• Family Based Progression: Settlement Level progress now checks for Families of a certain level to be living in the region rather than Burgage Plots of a certain level to be built.

• Living Space: Burgage Plot Upgrade: “Expansion” now gives +1 Living Space to the Plot regardless of Level.

• New Map: Added a new map "Twin Lakes".

• Battlefield Visibility: All squads inside an active Battlefield are now always visible.

• Battlefield Proximity: After a battle starts, the area around the Battlefield where units are counted as participating gradually shrinks. (This is not the Battlefield zone itself).

Ox Guiding behaviour:

• Only unassigned workers or workers from the Logging Camp can guide an Ox to a construction site.

• Only unassigned workers or workers from the building an Ox delivers to can be assigned to guide the Ox.

General:

• Approval Tiers "Admired" and "Revered" now increase income for Level 3 and Level 4 Plots by 1.

• Devil’s Hill: refreshed the trees, adjusted roads and spawn locations.

• Devil's Hill: added dirt cliffs and dirt hills, added additional shrubbery.

• Twin Lakes: replaced some of the rock cliffs with dirt cliffs, added dirt hills, lowered the height of the lake and adjusted the surrounding landscape.

• Families are now allowed to plow their Backyard Vegetable Gardens in November.

• Added Rough Stone and Rubble Stone pickup spots to the Quarry.

• Idle Workers that can sit down to rest at the Workplace no longer go home.

• Idle Workers closer to their Workplace than home will go inside the Workplace instead.

• Only specified workplaces are allowed to be entered when idle.

• Granary and Storehouse workers recalculate how much to collect when reaching a target building.

• Increased the regional limit per good in the Trading Post.

• Grave diggers now bring the corpse to the closest valid destination from the corpse position.

• Dead enemy soldiers may be buried in a corpse pit if it is much closer than a Church or in the aftermath of a large battle.

• Family members fetching water will pick the Well that gives the shortest round trip rather than the closest to their home.

• Further refined unit collision and collision avoidance code.

• Wild animals should avoid retreating into cliffs and ponds if possible.

• Manor buildings/modules no longer have road snapping points while placing them.

• Added a force correction when a character is pushed into an obstacle.

• Reduced collision radius for all civilians.

• Smoothed collision avoidance behaviour.

• Added extra collision resolving fallback.

• Since it's still WIP, the Siege Camp building option was hidden.

• Hunter's traps are now checked every 90 days, and have a chance to yield based on the strength of the Teeming Affinity.

• Armament Delivery adjusted to require 15 total population (5 housed families) and a storehouse to trigger delivery.

• Refined how pathfinding emergency mode works (Emergency triggers when a character is in a spot they can't get out from, for instance they build a fence around themselves).

• Battlefield placement will attempt to avoid overlapping Settlements.

AI:

• Will now take the amount of military equipment into account before adding another Militia squad.

• Will now take Artisans into consideration when calculating a region's input and output of Goods.

• Will now export any excess military Goods not deemed necessary for current or future squads.

• Will now raise all squads after pressing a Claim.

• Will now raise all squads once a Challenge starts.

• Fixed not defending owned but not settled regions.

• Fixed building roads in a new region before it's been settled.

• Fixed building other extensions on Residential plots designated for Artisan workshops.

• Fixed building Stone Gatherer Camp when a Quarry is under construction or when no more surface Rubble remains.

• Will no longer build a Stone Gatherer Camp for a rich Stone resource node.

• Will no longer try to settle additional regions until that mechanic is properly implemented.

• Added a temporary max cap to the number of families in AI regions.

• Fixed disbanding squads before they have looted a defeated bandit camp.

• Fixed being able to raise squads with less than five soldiers.

General:

• Wild Animals breeding speed doubled to accommodate the recent breeding bugfix in 0.8.050.

• Max Wild Animal Deposit size increased from 16 to 18 (normal) and 26 to 28 (rich).

• Barley growth time adjusted from Winter Crop to Spring Crop.

• Rye growth time adjusted from Spring Crop to Winter Crop.

• Increased Food Spoilage values and made them more consistent relative to each other.

• Increased the thresholds between Very Low, Low, Medium, High and Very High Food Spoilage.

• Starting amount of a Shoal of Fish deposit is now 80% (was 66%) ensuring its above the default Reserve of the Fishing Hut on game start.

• Taverns now have the same spoilage reduction as the Granaries.

• Updated Generic and Pantry storage on Burgage Plots to be more consistent.

Trade:

• Malt is now a Major Trade.

Styling & Quality of Life

• Added logic to detect OS preferred language on first startup after update.

• Added a preview of the existing limited Work Area when hovering the Work Area buttons.

• When displaying TAB Building Floaters, they now center around the camera pivot, and not the camera location.

• Added a short fade in when spawning TAB Building Floaters.

• Updated Living Space details tooltip to include Lv4 families. 

• Improved wording on resource deposit tooltips.

• Improved spacing for title on perk selection screen.

• \[WIP] Added a notification log prompt when a Settlement that is owned by another Lord levels up.

• Fishing Hut’s default Reserve is now relative to Rich or Normal deposit.

• Tooltips and references to Honey/Apiary now use a consistent icon.

• Wax is now displayed under Crafting Materials on the resource bar.

Text:

• Updated localization.

• Added "Deposits" to the Wiki with information about all natural resources.

• A person who works a Small Holding is now considered a Smallholder as their job title.

• Updated text for Burgage Plot upgrades to give more accurate info.

• Added translation text for resource deposits names.

• Added translation text for item categories in the family consumption tooltip.

• Added translation text for victory screen.

• Added translation text for dead hares.

• Added translation text for fire started.

• Added translation text for running from attackers task.

• Added translation text for on fire.

• Fixed missing translation string for all non-English languages adding a suffix to the letter creator’s first line.

• Fixed missing translation for when a fire propagates to nearby structures.

• Fixed translation for maintenance in Polish.

• Fixed Apiary translation for Burgage Plot upgrades.

Production

• Fixed workers not being able to pick up goods from their own workplace if their work area did not include their workplace.

• Fixed the chance of idle Workers going home or feeding chickens being twice as common as other idle tasks.

• Fixed Logging Camp workers not using the building’s stumps to sit around when idle.

• Fixed workers dropping transitionary items on “supplies” piles on the ground.

• Fixed storage buildings calling cart destruction functions twice on demolish.

• Fixed Millers not respecting the crafting Reserve of Grain.

• Fixed Butcher ignoring Production Limits.

• Fixed Wax carriers using the wrong walking animation.

• Fixed Wax not being collected by Storehouse Workers.

Military

• Fixed Battlefields drifting based on positions of units not actively involved in the combat.

• Fixed Battlefields ending up outside the region actually targeted by the challenge.

• Fixed enemy squads not being properly disbanded and removed when conquering another region.

• Fixed empty squads counting as active when determining if a battle is still ongoing.

• Fixed AI sending a peace offer, offering more treasury than they have.

• Fixed non-Bandit AI being able to raid.

• Fixed logic for when Challenge battles start and end.

• Fixed logic for deciding who won and lost after a Challenge battle ends.

Pathfinding

• Fixed people getting stuck during castle deconstruction due to the castle ladders being removed incorrectly.

• Fixed soldiers getting stuck on, or walking into cliffs during fights.

• Fixed characters getting stuck when they load within floating point error to a pathfinding obstacle.

• Fixed another instance of workers clogging in a narrow doorway.

• Fixed Ox guides running ahead of the Ox when at high game speeds.

• Fixed Twin Lakes fishing spots spawning inside the lake area.

• Fixed another instance of Retinue stuck in the Manor on rallying.

• Fixed wrong collision shape generating for water bodies with sharp turns on the bank (Eg. Small lake).

• Fixed ox guides sometimes abandoning ox when picking up last log from a supply dump.

• Fixed mules not being led back to the Pack Station when the worker is reassigned to a different job.

• Fixed workers just standing still due to not getting a path back from the pathfinder.

Save/Load

• Fixed fence collision of buildings that are being upgraded creating pathfinding issues after loading a saved game.

• Fixed Global Market Supply not resetting properly when starting a new game.

• Fix attempt for the game crashing if the engine fails to load unit templates properly.

• Fixed sowing task getting stuck during loading because of an invalid target building.

• Fixed drought data not being saved and loaded correctly.

• Fixed harvest prediction changing after save/load.

• Fixed Ox carts not being loaded properly.

• Fixed owner of Hunting Hounds not being saved and loaded.

• Citizens no longer transport weapons from a Burgage Plot into a Storehouse after loading a save.

Manor

• Increased the initial Manor palace bounds to cover the construction process timbers, otherwise they could spawn inside a cliff/lake and block construction.

• Fixed inability to build additional Manor buildings within the Manor area after placing walls due to changing building bounds.

• Fixed yet unbuilt Manor walls not updating cost in popup when modifying variant of stone walls.

• Fixed Manor buildings level change buttons not updating cost properly in popup after building becomes fully built.

• Fixed upgrading Manor modules for free if a second module of the upgraded type was already built.

• Fixed manor "ghost buildings" missing ghost material unless manor was initialized by loading a save file.

• Fixed invalid retinue ownership transfer when player or AI conquers region with Manor.

• Fixed reserved resources being taken twice for Manor primary building.

• Fixed stone Outer Tower pieces disappearing during reconstruction.

• Fixed the Castle Planner allowing you to upgrade for free.

• Fixed the unaffordable Manor exploit.

Miscelleanous

• Fixed another possible memory leak with TAB Building Floaters not erasing properly.

• Fixed issue with random camera shakes due to distant units not having their distance to the player updated yet.

• Fixed another possible instance of camera shake setting not applying.

• Fixed wrong Obstacle ID order after deleting an Obstacle, possibly leading to Obstacles being ignored during pathfinding or even crashing the game.

• Fixed valid good type arrays appending on each session start, leading to excess livestock spawning at Tradepoints.

• Fixed Market Stalls sometimes being overstocked by 1 good.

• Fixed maintenance slider in buildings changing frequency values to 0.25 and 4 instead of 0.5 and 2.

• Fixed Lv4 residential buildings sometimes pushing too deep into the plot area.

• Fixed not getting back the construction cost of a Burgage Expansion when demolishing.

• Fixed an instance of Ox stuck in collision with a Market Stall peddler.

• Fixed weavers sometimes sitting the wrong way while crafting.

• Fixed oversized Tier 4 Burgage Plots caused by using meters instead of centimeters in the scaling algorithm.

• Fixed ability to scroll map by moving cursor to border of the game window while fullscreen UI is opened.

• Fix attempt for people wearing plate armor during transport instead of carrying it.

• Fixed Of the Vogtland perk doubling capacity resources other than Berries and Mushrooms.

• Fixed pause or slowdown of game speed happening due to player continuously discovering encamped squads of bandits.

Text/UI

• Fixed burgage plot extension for extra family not being shown in available space UI while its construction started but was not yet finished.

• Fixed corrupted production building popup state that appears after assigning Family to workplace via Burgage Plot People UI.

• Fixed map names staying in the previously selected language in the Game Setup screen.

• Fixed the sidearms requirement displaying the incorrect icon in the Form Militia stats panel.

• Fixed Market supply/demand tooltip being in a broken state after switching tabs.

• Fixed tooltip for Berries deposit incorrectly displaying Pollination Affinity.

• Fixed Approval tooltip sometimes only displaying data from the player's starting region.

• Fixed player being able to see the Approval Rating of Regions they don't own.

• Fixed misaligned text in Residential Requirements.

• Fixed text error on Regensburg Guildmen perk that referenced a discount to Iron Ore instead of Iron Slab.

• Fixed missing text on Eel resource deposit.

• Fixed crash on late game saves when season was updated and too many fields updated their plowing on the GPU at once.

• Fixed bug in bandit camp initialization on game load, leading to crash on bandit camp removal.

• Fixed a crash that could occur when a building was burned down but was in queue for distribution of goods.

• Fixed crash on attempt to read family assigned to just abandoned stall (for example when removing multiple families from granary).

• Fixed crash caused by missing "does this unit clog other units" invalidating when deleting unit.

• Fixed crash often happening on mule animal appearance - trying to access an empty animation

• Fixed a crash on loading when a save contains an invalid task target building.

• Fixed crash related to idle units trying to find a conversation target outside of map.

• Fixed crash when building a bridge in the same place as a demolished bridge.

• Fixed crash on mercenaries disbanding after retreating out of map.

• Fixed a crash that could occur when putting out fire on a building.

• To increase the visual variety of wide LV4 Burgage Plots, the game will sometimes leave a facade gap and pick smaller house varieties.

• Fixed the Quarry rocks being covered in snow at the same time as the surrounding building area isn't.

• Re-added some Urban environment grass patches.

• Reduced grass pop in by adding a dithered fade in.

• Added variable turning rate so that small animals like Hares can rotate faster.

• Made Unit selection circles less distracting up close.

• Added ground blenders for Burgage Plot lv1 and Church lv1

• Tweaked behaviour of Hunting Hounds to look more responsive.

• Completely refactored the Event Notification system, for example to avoid Step FX events registering when the villager is far from the camera (where they can't be heard anyway).

• Fixed a lag spike happening when pressing TAB on a large city and spawning hundreds of Building Floaters.

• Implemented various building caches to greatly reduce worker task iteration times.

• Added farming task check skipping if the field is fully plowed, sown and growing.

• Fixed crop transform changes causing a lag spike on every "day passed" update on saves with huge fields.

• Removed periodic hitch of 80ms that occurred on large saves when calculating resident market requirements.

• Reduced spikes caused by problem banner updates happening all at once.

• Prevented particle effects from playing that were too far away.

• Reduced hitches when constructing buildings.

• Improved the way idle villagers search for an animal to pet.

• Made grass density to be variable on the camera angle.

• Stabilized Task updates.

• Greatly optimized the unit rendering system to avoid redundant transform updates.

• Greatly optimized Regional Stock and Surplus recalculation.

• Greatly optimized Regional Stock UI counter updates.

• Greatly optimized field texture updates.

• Reduced frequency of rotation updates to be in sync with location update frequency.

• Optimized idle task generation checking if someone already targets the worker with their own tasks.

• Optimized Farmers attempting to collect Crops for Threshing from buildings other than Fields.

• Optimized particle effects across the board.

• Optimized unit location interpolation frequency.

• Optimized the "find unit under cursor" function.

• Optimized the Warehouse and Granary tasks.

• Optimized searching for a conversation spot.

• Optimized searches for the nearest Cart.

• Optimized the "Get Resource" Task.

• Further optimized market supply distribution.

• Optimized water rendering on Twin Lakes.

You can report feedback and bug reports on the Manor Lords Steam forums or join us on Discord[discord.com] for bug reports and discussion about the latest patch.

Join our community on Discord[discord.com] and Reddit to ask questions, trade tips, and keep up with the game. There’s also a community-run wiki[hoodedhorse.com] that covers the most common questions, and you can follow Slavic Magic on Twitter for more developer updates.

Hello everyone,

Phew! I'll admit something. I'm back from a 3-week vacation, first proper one since I started the game in 2017 (I did a few trips before but always worked from a laptop anyway - not this time). Of course in the meanwhile the team was working hard, main focus was a pathfinding refactor that's still ongoing, but also as usual, we prioritized bugfixes.

For now, a new BETA version is available as the priority was to stabilize the previous version into the main branch.

We'd really appreciate it if you could take a moment to leave a Steam review. As we're working hard on the next update, fixing bugs, and adding new features, we'd love to hear what you think about Manor Lords. Your feedback, opinions, and support all help us know what to focus on, improve, and add to Manor Lords. Even if it's a few sentences about how you feel about the latest update, it'd be a great help to the team and me.

Saves: To avoid any potential issues, it’s recommended that you back up your saved files before switching to a beta version. Mods: Please remove any mods. They will most likely crash the game.

To find your Manor Lords Steam saves.

• Press Win + E

• Go to %USERPROFILE%]]AppDataLocalManorLordsSavedSaveGames into the search bar.

To try the BETA, please follow these steps:

• Open Steam

• Right-click on Manor Lords in your library

• Select Properties

• Go to the BETAS tab

• Enter the password: veryNiceBasket

• Choose "pre_release" from the "Beta participation" drop-down list

• Wait for the game to update the files (if nothing happens, restart the Steam client)

• Launch the game

You can report feedback and bug reports on the Manor Lords Steam forums or join us on Discord[discord.com] for bug reports and discussion about the latest patch.

Balance

- Spoilage on Sausages decreased 22%.

- Taverns now have the same spoilage reduction as the Granaries.

Minor changes:

- Generic and Pantry storage on Burgage Plots updated to be more consistent.

Text/UI:
- Localization update.

- Updated Wiki entry for Fish to give more accurate info.

Bugfixes:

- Fixed workers getting stuck on obstacles at the start of pathfinding.

- Fixed Regensburg Guildsmen tooltip and description not matching usage of Iron Slab.

- Fixed collision mismatch in pathfinding and collision code that could lead to stuck workers (Beta).

- Fixed "Fishing Limit reached" being shown on other workers than Fishermen (Beta).

- Better implementation for map scrolling fix from previous version.

- Fixed pause or slowdown of game speed happening due to player continuously discovering encamped squads of bandits.

- Fixed ox guides sometimes abandoning ox when picking up last log from a supply dump.

- Citizens no longer transport weapons from a Burgage Plot into a Storehouse after loading a save

- Fixed mules not being led back to the Pack Station when the worker is reassigned to a different job.

- Fixed invalid retinue ownership transfer when player or AI conquers region with manor.

- Fixed workers just standing still due to not getting a path back from the pathfinder.

Pssst. A little bonus teaser, we're working on new church levels, but we also want to expand the construction system a bit so that it requires professional builders.

Join our community on Discord[discord.com] and Reddit to ask questions, trade tips, and keep up with the game. There’s also a community-run wiki[hoodedhorse.com] that covers the most common questions, and you can follow Slavic Magic on Twitter for more developer updates.
Thank you for playing!

Greg