When you start out in Manor Lords you only have 5 families of villagers, which limits how many jobs can be assigned. You’ll quickly find you need more workers to provide for your village, so here’s how to attract new villagers in Manor Lords.
How to Increase Population in Manor Lords
To attract new villagers in Manor Lords you need two things: available housing and positive approval. If your overall approval in a region is at least 50% then 1 new family will move into an open housing slot every month, and if you’re sitting at over 75% approval then 2 families will move in. You’ll also see new family members join existing families, though a family can only be assigned one job at a time no matter how many members there are.
Conversely, if approval falls below 25% you’ll start to see families leave, so avoid that at all costs. The biggest causes of low approval are unfulfilled needs like housing and food, but also raising taxes and the presence of unburied dead bodies. Additionally, if Public Order gets too low families may even become bandits, which happens when you reach significantly low approval ratings or leave too many families unemployed.
How to Increase Approval in Manor Lords
Approval is governed by a number of factors and linked to your villager’s supply and amenity needs, which vary based on the level of the family. In the early game, the two most influential will be food variety and housing, which is why in our Getting Started in Manor Lords guide, we recommend building enough houses for your villagers (plus one more) early on. This is also because approval can take over 30 in-game days to register, so changes, both positive and negative, can take a while to either show up or fade out.
Food variety is also simple enough in the early game, gathering both berries and meat from wild animals will provide two varieties of food, also fulfilling on of the supply needs for level 1 families. If you need another source of food, either because one of your deposits ran out or if you need to satisfy level 2 families, bread can be obtained via the “Foreign Suppliers” development and traded for regional wealth. We don’t recommend this as a long-term source of food, but it can give you a lifeline to fall back on until your farming operations get up and running.
As your village grows more established, more ways to increase approval will appear, such as through churches and clothing. Churches require planks and stone in addition to timber, though you start with enough stone for your first. More stone can be mined from deposits and used right away, but planks must be refined from timber in the Sawpit and you will need about 20 of them to build a church.
We recommend building a sawpit once your basic necessities are covered and you have some spare families, as a church is an easy boost to approval and doesn’t even need to be staffed to grant its benefits. It is also used to bury villagers should any pass away in your region (though bandits will require the less salubrious Corpse Pit).
Clothing is another relatively easy source of approval, as the hides produced as a byproduct of hunting animals can be made into leather in a tannery. The leather can then be distributed at a market stall without requiring another step to be made into clothes. Later on, flax can be turned into linen and Sheep’s wool spun into yarn, but these require time- and resource-intensive farming, and so are best left until your village is more developed. The same goes for taverns, which require not just barley fields but also malthouses and brewery extensions to supply the needed ale.
So that’s how you grow your population and attract new villagers in Manor Lords. Just remember to keep up your food and firewood production to match.
Manor Lords will be released in Early Access on April 26, 2024, for PC via Steam, GOG, and the Microsoft Store, as well as on Xbox Game Pass for PC. An Xbox console version is also planned.
