Manor Lords puts bacon on the table in its newest update

Come here, piggy piggy

Slavic Magic / Hooded Horse

Manor Lords has slowly and steadily grown since its Early Access release a few months ago, adding more resources, buildings, troop types, and features – plus an engine switch from the venerable Unreal Engine 4 to its modern successor. 

In this large update, which is currently available for beta testing through a public preview branch of the game on Steam, developer Slavic Magic added fishing ponds, crossbowmen, and the butcher’s workshop to the game, adding more depth to the food economy and army building. There is also a new mechanic that makes food spoil over time, though players can counteract this by making food that includes the new resource salt.

Another topical addition to this upcoming version of the game has now been added to the test branch: Pigs. To support these animals, the goat pen extension for houses has been transformed into a more versatile animal pen extension, allowing you to choose between rearing goats or pigs.

Goats produce meat and hide in equal measure, while pigs will produce much more meat. As with everything else in the game, much care has been taken to make this addition as authentic as possible, so you’ll notice that the piggies don’t exactly look like modern ones – they appear to be a bit more wild and boar-like with lots of hairy patches on their bodies, which is how they have been portrayed in art from back in the day.

Slavic Magic intends to enable a bit more synergy between these animal pens and the butcher in future updates as well.

“Advanced Skinning doubles the Meat output of the extension, we're talking over further changes to the Development Branches related to husbandry and the Butcher, it would be nice to see more synergy between the Butcher and the Animal Pen Extensions,” the developer wrote.

Other small changes concern the communal oven, which will now require refueling, as well as some cosmetic aspects: Weather will change more quickly in the future, because players found the game to be “too gloomy” during long overcast periods, and some tweaks to the graphics in UE5 to make it look more like the original UE4 version.

Slavic Magic plans to push the update into the main branch once they are satisfied with its technical state.