Maintaining a steady food supply means that farming is crucial in Manor Lords. However, the farming system can be a bit confusing when you first start the game. Plus, the choices you make can affect your yields. To help you out, here are the best farming tips for Manor Lords.
Manor Lords: Tips for Successful Farms
Farming plays a big role in supplying food for your settlement to survive through winter. You use wheat for crafting bread. Then, you turn Barley into Malt for Ale, and turn Flax into clothing. All of these items can then be used to upgrade Burgage Plots by meeting the requirements for Food and Clothing Stalls, then later the Tavern Supply.
Use The Fertility Overlay and Manage Field Size
When you prepare to place your fields, the Fertility Overlay helps you choose an optimal location. There are three primary overlays that you want to use: Emmer (Wheat), Barley, and Flax. While a green area is the best option, yellow fertility is also viable. As you start out, avoid making your fields too large. When placing fields, you can see the measurement of size in Morgens. One family assigned to a farm can only tend a little over half a Morgen each year.
Then, you also want to use Fallow to restore the fertility that’s lost from growing other crops. Using the Crop Rotation option and multiple fields, always have one field set to Fallow and the others to crops. Make sure you rotate the field that has Fallow each year so that you can continuously bring fertility back without sacrificing too much food. Essentially, growing Fallow every three years tends to be a safe bet, so use that standard even if you just have a single field.
Adding Animals to Your Farm
This centers around your Development Points. If you want to help your farmers, then you want to spend points on the Fertilization option and the Heavy Plow option. The Fertilization option opens up the option to make a Pasture, which is the fastest way to raise fertility. Then, the Heavy Plow option speeds up how quickly a field is plowed, which means that you can farm a larger area with the same number of families.
Prepare to Process Crops
Having Wheat is great, but it’s useless if you don’t have the buildings required to process it. You need a Mill and either a Communal Oven or a Burgage Plot with a Bakery upgrade for their backyard area. This transforms Wheat into Bread, which adds to your food supplies. Similarly, Barley needs to be processed into Malt before a Tavern can use it. However, Flax can be used by weavers as is. As such, don’t forget to make sure that you have the buildings needed to turn farm crops into usable products, and that those buildings have families assigned to them.
As of right now, these are the best farming tips in Manor Lords. Since it’s in Early Access, it’s possible that the system will be changed in the future to add more aspects you need to track. When that time comes, we’ll update this piece with any additional information you need to know. Until then, check out our Manor Lords guide hub for more content.
