Manor Lords Beginner Guide: The Best Start, Farming and First Raiders

This opening takes a new Manor Lords town from its starting five families to a village with an oat farm, a plank trade and its first cleared bandit camps. Work through it in order and you reach the first winter fed and housed, with money in the treasury and the rival lord kept short of influence.

Quick answer

Choose a start and read the top bar

For a first town, pick the Wide Valley map and the Restoring the Peace scenario 1:02. Leave the settings on default and leave raiders on — they are manageable and they are a source of influence. Fractured Realm puts AI lords on the map, and their behaviour is still rough, so it is a poor place to learn. You can drag your starting location before you confirm.

Pause as soon as the map loads. Z and X slow down and speed up the game.

Every game starts with 5 families and no houses, so housing reads -5. The top bar decides whether your town grows, and these are the counters that matter early:

Oxen are the only thing in the game that can haul logs, and not buying more of them is the classic first-game mistake 3:55. You start with one ox and room for one. Click the hitching post and order a second ox straight away. Stable space now reads full, so you will need a second hitching post the moment it arrives — an ox with nowhere to stand runs off and the regional wealth you spent on it is gone.

Food and fuel shrink faster as the town grows, because every new family eats from the same stock. Fuel consumption only shows once families have moved into burgage plots.

Approval has to be above 50 before anyone moves in, however many houses are free 5:51. The first year is the exception: it adds one extra family each month. Migrants arrive on the 1st and around the 18th of the month, so with high approval and 2 or more free homes you get two arrivals a month. The date sits in the bottom corner of the screen.

You cannot build in a region until you claim it, and claiming costs influence: 1,000 for an unclaimed region, 2,000 for one the rival lord owns — and he will fight you for his. The quickest early influence comes from killing outlaw camps, marked on the map with their own icon 8:14. Their raiders steal a little from your stockpiles, which is a nuisance rather than a threat.

Last, check timber. You start with 8, which is not enough to build much, so the first priority is a logging camp.

Pick a start region with farmland

Zoom out to see the resource icons in your region. A crown above an icon marks a rich resource, and every region has two of them 10:07. Farmland counts as one, but it has no icon — you have to look for it.

Open the construction tab and switch the overlay to Oat Fertility. Green means rich soil; red means a region that will never farm well.

Resource types behave differently once you start using them:

Farming is worth restarting for 11:32. If the green overlay is missing from your starting region, reload until a farming region comes up. The rest of this guide assumes you have one, plus a fish pond.

Build your first logging camp and houses

The aim of the first month is a sixth family before April. Skip the granary and storehouse for now — they come next. Everything here is about walking distance: an ox dragging logs across the map is what loses you that family.

1. Keep the game paused around March 2nd and make sure your second ox is on order — it arrives within a month 12:01
2. Gathering tab → Logging Camp, placed right against the log pile, not by the King's Road or the berries costs 2 logs · 12:29
3. Unpause; once the camp is up, assign 3 families and raise its maintenance 2 tools a year instead of 1; you start with 10 · 13:24
4. Run a road from the camp and connect it to the King's Road
5. Residential tab → Burgage Plots, laid right in front of the logs, about three families' worth 14:24
6. Leave each plot deep enough for a backyard extension chicken coops and other livestock need it later
7. When the second ox arrives, build its hitching post immediately without stable space it runs away · 15:21
8. At 9 timber, lay out three more plots so the town reaches 6 houses
9. Near the end of March, with 19 timber banked, pull 2 families off the logging camp to finish the last house 16:46

Housing should now read 1 free, and a new family takes it within days.

Backyard extensions matter more than they look. A plot without the extra space behind it can never take livestock or a large vegetable garden, and a town without them struggles to feed itself later. Some plots also offer a second-house option; you only pay for it when you choose to build it.

Add storage, markets, water and food

The sixth family is in. Now the town needs somewhere to keep things and something to eat.

1. Logistics tab → Storehouse, close to the trees 17:16
2. Granary next to your food source — the fish pond, here
3. Residential tab → Marketplace with at least 6 stall locations 8 is fine · 17:45
4. On April 2nd, when the new family arrives, buy the third ox and build its hitching post at once leaves about 10 regional wealth · 18:13
5. Residential tab → Well, on the blue ground only one covers about 15 houses · 18:42
6. Staff the granary as soon as it finishes and haul the food in
7. Set the next house to highest priority so it finishes before April 18th 20:08
8. Gathering tab → Fisherman's Hut, beside the fish, not beside the granary 21:07
9. Gathering tab → Woodcutter's Lodge, next to the trees, then staff it before fuel runs out 23:01

Food spoils as a percentage of what is stored, so the same loss hurts far more in a small pile — 2 out of 50 goes much faster than 2 out of 500. A granary fixes that, and upgraded to a large granary it holds 2,500 23:31.

The marketplace shows its supply level when you click it. As it turns orange and then red, put more families on the stalls. Click any house to see which needs are unmet; meeting them raises approval.

Once the town is housing 5 families and has a storehouse, an armored delivery arrives with 20 spears and 20 shields 19:10. That is your first spear militia.

Later, the charcoal kiln in the industry tab turns one firewood into two charcoal. It needs more families than you have now, so leave it.

To delete a road, highlight it, hold Alt and remove it.

Set up a three-field oat farm

Oats are the best early crop: the farmhouse turns them into food itself, with no windmill and no communal oven. Start them early.

1. Mark out a farming area with roads where the Oat Fertility overlay is bright green
2. Split it into three field groups — one per year of the rotation 26:23
3. Farming tab → Farmhouse in the middle, with free space beside it for hitching posts 26:50
4. Draw many small fields in each group, not one big one an ox plowing one field blocks everyone else from it · 28:18
5. Tick Crop Rotation on every field: fallow, then oats, then oats — each group starting on a different year 28:46
6. Buy the Heavy Plow upgrade, then add two oxen in the farmhouse's livestock tab 30:10
7. Assign 4 families, taking spare workers from other buildings
8. By September, when seeding starts, raise the farmhouse to 5–7 families 36:25
9. When every field is plowed, unassign the oxen and the spare farmers 49:24

Staggering the groups means one group rests each year while the other two grow oats, so the farm always produces and no soil is farmed every single year. A wheat-then-rye rotation looks like a sensible alternative, but in practice it drags fertility down year after year until it reaches 0%. Oats on oats with a fallow year holds up better.

In autumn the families bring the oat sheaves into the farmhouse, plow and sow again, then return to the farmhouse and turn the sheaves into oats there 32:05. By late September one farm can hold 162 sheaves waiting to be processed, so three months of food on the counter is nothing to worry about.

Expand with foresters, planks and trade

Planks are the money-maker for a town without rich stone or clay, and they also pay for the church that unlocks house upgrades.

1. Build a second logging camp and three foresters around the logging area 33:02
2. Forester → Advanced tab, hold Ctrl and scroll to set the planting circle away from your houses 34:29
3. Place a sawpit and set its production limit in the Advanced tab about 14; about 8 in the very first months · 46:03
4. Give the sawpit and the logging camp a dedicated ox each from their livestock tab otherwise logs lie where they fell · 48:54
5. Logistics tab → Trading Post beside the blue trading point, with houses for its 4 families and room for 4 horses 48:27
6. Add a storehouse next to the trading post so goods are carried there ahead of time
7. Trading post → Trade: export clay, keep 50 planks and sell the rest, import tools keeping 5 in stock 53:16
8. Residential tab → Church, built from planks 53:46
9. When a house's needs all turn green, upgrade it to level 2 56:11
10. Buy a horse for the trading post once money comes in carries 50 items · 1:02:25

Trading points are the blue markers on the map. Traders have to carry every sale there, which is why the trading post and its storehouse sit right beside one. Clay, planks and tools are minor trades, so you can sell and buy them without unlocking a trade route. Run out of tools and the logging camp, sawpit and most other workshops stop, so keep that import running.

Clay and stone are worth taking while they last. Two mining pits fit on the same clay deposit even when it is not rich, for up to 6 families, at a higher risk of collapse. On a stone deposit that is not rich, the quarry is unavailable; use a stone gathering camp instead.

Level 2 homes matter beyond comfort: without them approval never reaches 80, and 80 is what keeps two migrations a month coming after the first year 1:00:31. When you upgrade a plot, its family becomes a permanent craftsman. Unassign the family first and pick the trade yourself — make one a joiner and tell it to make shields, which sell alongside your planks.

Winter is building season. Farmers and foresters cannot work, so every idle family joins construction. Seasonal assignments exist, but they can grab families you want unassigned.

Assign families by hand and keep a few unassigned on purpose. Families working vegetable plots in their own backyards need to be free to do it, and the automatic assignment will pull them into jobs elsewhere 47:30.

Handle bandit camps and the first raiders

Open the army tab and select the spear militia. You can only rally them inside your own region, so pick a spot near the edge closest to the camp. Make them walk the whole way: running tires them, and tired troops die more often in the fight 35:27.

Bandits sally out once you get close, so choose the ground before they reach you. Fighting inside a forest gives your army a penalty. Hold an opening or a bridge, set a shield wall, and make it three lines deep 37:23.

Every militiaman is a worker who is not building. Marching on a first bandit camp took 20 of the town's 44 people away from work. That is the strongest reason to switch to mercenaries quickly.

When the camp falls, claim it and choose where the loot goes. Send it to the treasury, not regional wealth 37:53. The treasury is what hires mercenaries, and mercenaries clear every later camp without pulling families off construction.

Claiming the camp matters as much as the loot. One cleared camp gave 460 influence, and 1,000 claims a new region 38:49. The rival lord hires mercenaries and claims camps too. Every camp you ignore is influence he collects, and with enough of it he claims region after region and turns aggressive before you have a defence. When his army is sighted heading for a camp, get there first.

Heavy mercenary archers are cheap and do well in melee against outlaws 58:06. Station them in the middle of your region between fights so you always know where they are.

To send militia home fast, rally them to your settlement and then disband them. Rallying teleports each soldier back to their house, so they are at work at once instead of walking back from the edge of the map 45:05.

The first raid is not immediate: expect it within about a year of your second March. Use that time to stack up planks and sales so the treasury can pay for a defence when it comes. With 1,300 influence banked, claim a small unowned neighbouring region — the rival lord does not contest one he does not own 1:01:28.

Also worth knowing