In the more demanding Restoring the Peace scenario which has all three types of enemies present on the map I recommend starting a few times over, recording each start as a separate save file and choosing the most convenient start as the one for your playthrough.


Here is also my video guide if you prefer to watch:

Now what makes a convenient start? Well that is a start in one of the map regions where you have ample food sources close to your starting location with resources which you need later on in a playthrough farther from your initial village location. There is a special marking on resource locations, the small crown above their icon which marks them as rich deposits.


This means the amount found there is above standard, usually double. So to be able to avoid two of the biggest pitfalls of Manor Lords gameplay, which are lack of food and lack of money, your best bet is to start in a region which has a rich deposit of berries, close to your starting position.


This advantage can be very quickly multiplied by a factor of two, once you reach the first settlement milestone and gain a village development point.


Because once you invest that point into forest management you double the capacity of berry deposits, getting that rich berry source up to 256, and when you learn that it regrows actively during spring, it means you can harvest over 300 barriers during the first year.


These barriers can be sold for a great sum per unit at the local trader building which you have to construct and operate, and considering how easy it is to harvest them it is an amazing way to make easy money.


This money is key for purchasing new animals like oxen and horses which are the backbone of your local workforce. This is another major pitfall of Manor Lords gameplay and an additional reason why this is a great way to start as you solve many future problems at once.

Now that you have chosen the perfect spot for a start, hopefully you have animals to hunt close by which leads to multiple types of food for your villagers, we can talk about the optimal order in which to construct your first buildings. Keep the game paused using the spacebar keyboard key until you finish planning your village.

With just 8 timber to begin with, building choices are limited, and also of important note the supplies, like bread, firewood and tools are left out in the open and in danger of being destroyed by bad weather.


This means you have to quickly construct a storehouse and a granary to keep these supplies safe. But on the other hand if you leave your villagers homeless for a long time, your approval rating will suffer, due to negative homeless traits. From my experience it is better to give the people a roof over their heads first, and then take care of the supplies as you probably won’t get bad weather in the first month or two.

But first things first, you need some roads onto which you will stick your first buildings. Using the R keyboard key as a shortcut you draw some roads but also look at where the well can be constructed. Which is above underground water paths. When you click on the well in the build menu the overlay for water paths will automatically come over the map.


This prevents you from putting down roads over such water sources. You don't need to spend timber on the well right now as that is something first homes require only once they have been constructed.


You can use the road tool to finish marking out the first sections of the village and connect that to the future food harvesting locations in the nearby woods. To be efficient in Manor Lords you have to build stuff close to the supply of resources, otherwise your villagers will spend a great deal of time just moving about and you don’t have that much time to waste.

The logging camp from the gathering building section is the first building you need next to this forest to have a supply of timber for all future construction and goods production. Road connections are present on all four sides of the building and should be connected to your existing road network immediately.


To construct something in Manor Lords one family has to use your starting Ox animal to move the timber from a stockpile to the construction location. This family has to be unassigned, meaning you need at last one family without a main job.


But to build efficiently you also need one more family unassigned to act as builders and manual laborers which transport by hand items like rocks or planks to buildings that require them in their construction.

This is no issue at the start when no one is doing any other job, but later it requires a lot of constant micromanagement and is the reason why I don’t consider Manor Lords a city builder, but rather a settlement manager. Much more a Banished like game instead of a Cities Skylines kind of a game.

The hunting camp is a type of a building which doesn’t require any sort of resource to be constructed but it will also always be last in the construction queue which is an important fact to be aware of.


Now you can use the X and Z time controls to speed up the game as your villagers construct the logging camp and you plan out the placement of first homes. These should be constructed near the workplaces, again to reduce the time wasted by villagers moving across the settlement.

The four point system of marking out future homes in Manor Lords is very good for manually planning out the size and location of villager’s homes. The main white section represents the home, the top hammer and roof icon represents the home improvement like a garden or chicken coop, while the last home icon with a plus sign represents the opportunity to upgrade the home to have room for two families instead of one.


My advice is to always construct homes which have all three icons as this gives you more options moving forward and later upgrading what you want, where you want.

Each of these homes requires two timber meaning after the construction of the logging camp you are left with timber enough for 3 homes. You can see that villagers have some digging to do when constructing buildings, which is exactly why you need more than just one free family for fast construction of buildings.


When the logging camp is finished you need to do two things, add a family to work there, and use the advanced tab of its options to limit the work area to a section of the forest right next to this building to keep your workers as efficient as possible.


Considering you will be out of timber and can’t use the villagers for anything else besides constructing the hunting camp you can add more families to work at the logging camp to speed up timber production.

The game will warn you with red icons about the lack of a granary and storehouse next to the already existing warning about homelessness. This is why I said this is a trade off and you can’t expect to have everything immediately.


Once you have two new timber harvested you can plan for the next buildings. I recommend that you keep going with villagers' homes because you can see that the approval rating is already suffering due to homeless people and that will prevent your village from gaining new families. You have to keep that approval rating above 50% for a new family to move in at the end of a month.


The last, fifth house shouldn’t be a problem at this rate and as I said keep it close to your already constructed buildings especially because future production buildings themselves need to be close to each other to keep goods transfer times between them to a minimum.

With the last home receiving delivery of needed timber, you can jump to planning the location of the necessary storehouse and a granary. Again these two should be placed as close to food and goods production as possible to keep the mentioned efficiency to a maximum.


Using the snap to roads option in the build menu will make choosing a spot for these easier. As the granary also requires stone to be built, constructing it close to the starting stockpile makes it faster for the villagers bringing the stones by hand.

At the compilation of the fifth home you level up your settlement, reaching the first milestone and unlock a development point. You need to click at the top UI section on the settlements name to access this development branch screen, and here your best bet is to choose the forest management option as I explained already, which will double the number of berries available for harvesting on the already rich deposit.


This is the easy path to lots of food, money, animals that money can buy, and even dye for clothing later on.


But right now your job is to complete the construction of the granary and storehouse. Both of which are crucial to not just keeping your resources safe but also to make them available at the market, with the objective of increasing your approval rating.

Make sure to manage the logging camp’s working area manually to keep it running smoothly. But the game will remind you of it with a pop up if you forget. With more timber available, the storehouse is the next construction project, and you will use the speed controls X and Z to get this done fast.


You can also keep planning out the next construction projects like the well as these homes you built require a well to be able to level up and be satisfied.


The granary needs a family to work there so you can get your starting bread out of the sun and rain and into a safe place. It will be the same with tools and firewood once the storehouse building is completed.

Now finally we get to actually planning out the food collecting, specifically the berries and once you select the forager hut for construction and take it over to the berries location you will see the bushes outlined so you don’t crush them with the foundations of the forager hut.


Since you already have enough timber for all the basic buildings, you can now reduce the number of families working at the logging camp and use them in the newly constructed buildings.

My road design in this village is going to be very simple and mostly straight, but Manor Lords is great at allowing curved and freeform building so you can do that insead. What I need this space for in the intersection is for a big market.


This market will be a place where family members of those that work in different production or collection buildings will build stalls and share their goods with other villagers. This will directly increase your approval rating and satisfy the needs of the villagers who live in level one homes. A big space for a market now will save you the hassle of making another spot for it later on.

As I mentioned before, the storehouse needs a family to work in it too, so once you do that they will move the goods inside and also receive the shipment of weapons and shields you are given by default when you play in the Restoring the Peace scenario.


This move will also bring you into a big problem with lack of manpower. As now you have one family working in the storehouse, one in the granary, another in the logging camp, one moving timber with an ox and one constructing buildings. Which is the total of 5 you have started with. This is where you find out that Manor Lords is much more a settlement manager than a city builder.

The two families left to work on construction and timber moving will do the job of finishing the well, while back at the market you can probably see some stalls being put up. When you click on it, in the UI that opens up, you can hover your mouse over different supplies like food variety, fuel and clothing to see which homes are supplied with what.


Until you gather some berries there is another way to increase food variety and through that the approval rating of your villagers.


That is to construct additions in the homes themselves like a chicken coop or vegetable garden. Do note that chickens are more expensive, and with the starting funds you can get only two, while you can get three vegetable gardens. On the other hand, those vegetables take a long time to grow and can be harvested only rarely during the year, while chickens give eggs during the whole year. It is a trade off, and just to show you how long it takes for the vegetables to be harvested I will choose those.

With the hunting camp and forager hut constructed you should keep in mind that berries are limited by seasons in which they grow so make sure to gather them first with one family. Do know that to be able to give villagers some sort of clothes you need leather which is made from hides. So another family working in the hunting camp is also necessary, but not so much for food, as for the clothing needed, which is something that will increase your approval rating once you have leather at the market.


With a 50% approval rating and the first month about to be finished you have everything you need to move forward, expanding both your population and your village. The main next two steps are finishing the leather production chain with a tannery and building a church to satisfy the villagers' need for religion.


That church takes planks to construct while the tannery requires only timber making it much easier to finish sooner. This process is slowed down due to you having only one remaining family free for ox use and construction so to gain more of a workforce you will need new homes for more villagers to move in.


You can see the living spaces expanding in the top left UI section, due to a new house being under construction but you also need the approval to stay above 50%.

Since you currently lack the workforce we have to take a family away from some work and you can choose to free up one from the storehouse or the hunting camp to employ at the tannery so you can finally get some leather for the market and boost your villagers approval rating as leather hits the market.

To get planks you need a sawpit in which villagers convert timber into planks. The optimal placement is next to the logging camp as that is where logs are transported to after cutting down trees. To free up more space around that starting logging camp you should keep using the manual placement of the work area.


As you can see up in the top UI our approval rating is finally past 50% due to food variety available on the market with berries, bread and meat on the stalls. Clothing is still at 0 despite the tanner making the first leather as it is not yet moved to the market stall. This is something the workers' family at the tanner can do by constructing a market stall.


The UI section on families will tell you if you have population growth and if you do, and have a free home, a new family will move in by the end of the month.

With the new clothing stall being constructed at the market you can see the family working in the tanner gain a market icon on their portrait meaning their goods will soon be distributed there and available for villagers to take to their homes.


Looking at the berries resource point you can see just how high it has grown, almost to the maximum amount, and you will have to harvest it as soon as you can, if you want to be able to get even more berries out of it as they regrow during the spring months.


Once the sawpit is constructed, you don’t have to send a family to work there if you don’t have some timber in storage as it is a required good to make planks, but instead use that family to harvest more timber.


After a while you can go back to the market and when hovering over the clothing you can see directly on the houses how many have gained access to it. Fuel won’t give you a boost during the warm months but it can be a problem during the later winter months.

This means you can ignore the warning about running out of fuel when it shows up in the top UI bar, and keep watching that approval UI bar to see newly available goods boosting your villagers approval rating.


At the moment of change between the current and next month your approval rating will be reset to 50%, while at the same time if it was above 50% in the previous month in the next one you will receive a new family.


You can click on that message to see where they moved in.

Now you can finally play around with the workplaces a bit more as you have an extra family to employ. If the tanner has converted all the hides into leather, send that family to make planks at the sawpit, while you can remove the one working in the storehouse and use the two unassigned ones to prepare new houses for even more new families moving in during the next month.

Planks do take a while to produce, and you need a lot of them for construction of the church, so use the time to expand your village and micro your production. When the animals are at full capacity employ the hunters back at the hunting camp and when the animals are half exhausted move that family to tan hides while the fauna recovers for more hunting.

Once you finally have all 20 planks crafted, get cracking at that church. Access to religion is a major boost to approval rating but it will also take up a whole family to work there. It is a major construction project and it will take a while to finish so make sure to have at least two families working on it.

If you check your vegetable gardens and market food stalls you will see that despite several months passing there are still no vegetables available for your villagers to eat.


This is why I said that dispute chicken coops higher cost, they are a much faster food source.

As the villagers are working on the church you can see that the approval rating keeps growing due to good food and clothing access.


The church will boost this even higher and the game should be giving you two new families per month if you can keep the approval rating above 75%. This sometimes doesn’t happen for reasons I can only hope are bugs. The game is only just entering Early Access so stuff like that is expected.

If you want to be a master micromanager you can even zoom into particular villagers at their jobs and remove them and their family from workplaces right at the moment they complete their current jobs.


As the church gets the delivery of the resources necessary for construction you can invest your timber into a woodcutter’s lodge to start preparing for winter and cutting down many timbers into firewood.


I would say at least 70 to 100 firewood to make sure you go through the first winter with no problems. Especially as bandits might seal some of it.

With May turning into June you will receive another new family to your humble village bringing the total to seven families.


These newcomers are perfect for the family working at the finally completed church and new homes are again needed. You could expand homes instead of constructing new ones, but at the start I prefer to build more so I can have more opportunities for new vegetable gardens and chicken coops.

With that we are in summer and the villagers' homes will soon have all their needs met allowing you to upgrade them to the next level and reach the next village milestone.


I believe this is the best time to end this first starting guide and move onto the more advanced one in the next one.