Fishing has arrived in Manor Lords and by God, it's satisfying

In Manor Lords, food has been an essential part of the gameplay from the first Early Access release back in April 2024.

And for good reason: people need food to stay alive! In any city builder where population is actually a thing, you will need to provide food. 

For Manor Lords developer SlavicMagic to introduce a new type of basic food resource is a gift to the community. It makes players have to rely less on the seasonal supply of berries or a herd of wild animals you can only hunt down to 10 to avoid them migrating away.

Fishing in the pond

To be able to introduce fish as a food source, Manor Lords first needed to introduce ponds. 

And my oh my, don't they look pretty?

Aside from a lot of other improvements and additions, the update to Unreal Engine 5 also allowed for better graphics. Like this fishing pond. 

A fishing pond with 3 fishermen and the fishing hut in the background between the trees.

Just like other resources, fishing ponds have a certain amount of fish. They do breed in spring, allowing you to fish in summer and autumn. Not in winter though, because you can't pull fish out of a frozen pond.

Except, you can! If you spend a development point on Advanced Pondkeeping, it will double the maximum capacity of fish in the pond. Not only that, it will also enable workers to cut holes in the ice to allow for them to fish all year round, even in winter.

New building: fisherman's hut

Fish is caught by fishermen and fisherwomen who work from a fisherman's hut.

These people will walk to the pond, cast out their hooks and just wait. Once a fish has been hooked, they reel it in and bring it back to the hut. 

From there, the fish will be transported either to the granary or sold directly at the market. The latter is only possible if you allow the fisherman's hut to set up a market stall.

The fisherman's hut has space for 3 families to work. The hut only has a pantry and is able to store 50 fish. That sounds like a lot, but as a whole family can fish (moms too!) that 50 storage space fills up quickly.

Food spoilage affects fish

Even though the fisherman's hut can store up to 50 fish, it is important to get the fish transported to a granary or market stall as soon as possible. Fish stored in the pantry of a fisherman's hut has a high food spoilage rate.

Manor Lords doesn't use exact numbers to show the amount of food spoilage, but we can assume 'high' is never good news. Especially when compared to 'medium' for meat stored at a hunting camp. 

The good thing is: storing fish inside a regular granary already lowers the spoilage rate for fish to medium. The description when upgrading to a large granary does mention even less food spoilage, but for fish it is still showing as medium. 

If you care about the numbers, it is a 1% difference between a regular and large granary. Probably not solely worth upgrading your granary for, but it's a nice to have if it's upgraded anyway.