How to increase your population in Manor Lords

By Jesse Lennox April 30, 2024

A humble village in Manor Lords. — Slavic Magic

People are your most important resource in Manor Lords. Without a growing population, you won’t be able to effectively build new structures, staff your buildings, and have people ready to fight any battles.

While you are in charge of almost all aspects of your growing kingdom, you can’t force new people to join your village if they don’t want to. Your grand plans for the perfect kingdom will be thwarted before they even begin if you can’t figure out how to increase your population to help build that dream. There are two main factors you need to understand to grow a population, but one is a bit less clear.

How to grow your population

A menu detailing the population of a town in Manor Lords. — Slavic Magic

The first and most obvious cap to your population is how many burgage plots you have. You start out with a few homeless citizens, but new families aren’t too interested in joining a village if they will have nowhere to sleep. You can build up multiple plots, or upgrade existing burgages to allow for more people to live in them. Also, other buildings like churches and the Manor allow families to live in them as well.

However, even if you have an entire neighborhood of new homes waiting for people to move in, no one will if your approval rating is too low. This is notated by a percentage marker on the bar at the top of the screen. If you have a rating of 24% or below, you will lose one population every month. If it’s between 25% and 49%, there will be no change, 50% to 74% will add one person per month, and 75% to 100% will add two people per month. So long as you’re above 50% and there is space for them, your population will steadily grow.

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Gaming

Is Manor Lords on console?

A snowy settlement in Manor Lords.

It's kind of hard to believe that a substantial game like Manor Lords could be developed by only one person, but that hasn't stopped it from being an absolutely massive success since its April 26 release date. Rising rapidly to become the top-selling game on Steam and hitting a staggering number of concurrent players, this Early Access strategy title is certainly making a name for itself right out of the gate. However, despite being such a popular game on Steam and PC Game Pass, some players may be wondering if and when they can get their hands on it for consoles. It's currently a tricky question to answer, but here's what we know so far about whether Manor Lords will come to consoles.
Is Manor Lords on console?
Manor Lords is not currently available on any consoles. That doesn't mean we won't see this successful game make its way over to additional platforms, though. In early May 2024, developer Greg Styczeń confirmed on Twitter that he's working with publisher Hooded Horse to bring Manor Lords to Xbox "as soon as possible." While we don't know how soon that will actually be, it seems that Microsoft's console will at least receive the game at some point in the (hopefully) near future.

When asked about a possible PlayStation 5 version of Manor Lords in the same Twitter thread, Styczeń stated: "We're still talking about it." This may mean a potential PS5 release could be much further out than the Xbox version. And given Styczeń's silence about a Nintendo Switch release, it's not looking particularly likely that it will receive a version of Manor Lords at all — though only time will tell.

Gaming

The best developments to get first in Manor Lords

A town in a valley in Manor Lords.

It feels a little bit like cheating in Manor Lords, but the development upgrades you can get can do some powerful things to improve your settlement. However, to balance things out, the development points you need to unlock these enhancements are given out very sparingly. In fact, you won't get even close to the amount needed to unlock everything on the sphere grid. To make matters even more stressful, there's no way to undo a choice you make, so any point spent in error is locked in until you start a new game. There's none that can make your game harder, but if you pick one that offers no benefit to your current settlement or goals, it might as well be a negative in terms of the opportunity cost. For the best experience, here are the developments you should invest in first.
How to get development points
Before you can spend any development points in Manor Lords, you have to earn them. This is a slightly obfuscated system that you may not fully understand if you're not paying close attention, but it does make sense once you know what's going on. Development points are tied to you reaching new settlement levels. You can incrementally grow to a small village, a medium village, a large village, a small town, a medium town, and -- finally -- a large town. Each one requires a larger number of burgage plots and for you to upgrade more of them to higher levels. In any one settlement, you can earn six development points.
Best developments to get first

The development tree is broken down into four segments: farming, trade, gathering, and industry. Here are some of the best ones you can unlock early.
Heavy Plow
No settlement can survive only on hunting and foraging for food. Farming is the only way to make sure your storehouses are well stocked with food, but even a fully staffed farm is painfully slow to harvest. The Heavy Plow upgrade adds a plowing station to your farms so you can make use of an ox to not only make plowing your fields far faster, but also tospeed up transporting your crops to the storehouse.
Charcoal Burning
Preparing for winter is your primary concern for your first year, if not the first two, in Manor Lords. Lack of food is one thing, but if you run out of fuel to keep your population warm, they won't last long. Firewood is your basic form of fuel, but it is very inefficient. This development lets you build a charcoal kiln that gives you two charcoal for every one firewood you feed into it. That will double your potential fuel reserves in a snap.
Deep Mining
All natural resources will eventually run dry. While you can regrow trees and let berries regrow, ore deposits only have so much material for you to mine before they're tapped out. You can break the laws of nature with the Deep Mining development that lets you upgrade any mine into a deep mine that somehow never runs out of ore. This only works on the slightly rare rich deposits, but is still incredibly powerful to have an unending source of ore to build or sell.
Sheepbreeding
Speaking of getting an unending source of materials and money, Sheepbreeding makes something that you would expect to happen, but by default does not, actually occur. If you have a sheep farm, those sheep will be completely uninterested in mating and having more sheep babies. Snag this development to let nature take its course and get yourself an infinite supply of sheep for materials and to trade for quite a high price.
Better Deals
And while you're trading, unlock better deals to keep from getting ripped off. There's a tariff on anything you import in Manor Lords of 10 regional wealth, but this perk waives that annoying fee. Since you never quite know what resources you will have and what you will need to import to build your next structure or upgrade, importing is essential for reaching the late game. The earlier you invest in this, the more you'll save in the long run.

Gaming

All Incantations and how to unlock them in Hades 2

Melinoe fighting under a full moon in Hades 2.

You can't have a game where you play as a witch without a massive cauldron. Hades 2 places one front and center in the Crossroads, but it isn't just there for decorative purposes. Melinoë can use this big boiling pot of green liquid to bring new features into the game, whether it be between runs or during them, in exchange for various materials like Silver. You will only start out with a few Incantations, but doing more runs and getting further toward your goal of killing Chronos will gradually unlock more to create. There are far more than you might expect for an early access game. Here are all the Incantations and their recipes.
Every Incantation, effect, and recipe
The order in which you unlock Incantations in the menu can vary based on what you do and how you progress in Hades 2, so this list is in no particular order. Also, it is possible there are more we haven't been able to unlock yet, so we will update this list if we discover any more or if additional ones are added during early access.

Incantation name