The next Manor Lords update is out! Download patch 0.8.004 now!

The hit game Manor Lords kicked up quite a storm earlier this year. At release time in April, it was the most wishlisted game ever on Steam.

After the initial release, a few updates were pushed to players. Then, developer SlavicMagic took a step back to work on the next update in piece with his newfound colleagues. 

What can we expect of this new version 0.8.004? Spoiler: it's a lot!

What to expect of the next release of Manor Lords

In the last couple of months, a lot has effort has been put into upgrading the Unreal Engine. This is the framework or codebase on which Manor Lords is built on. 

Unreal Engine 5 offers a lot of improvements over the previous version UE4. And, let's not forget that UE4 support by Epic has ended. So any new development or support questions solely focus on UE5, which forces game developers to make the switch.

Aside from the upgrade to Unreal Engine 5, a lot of changes big and small will be introduced in the new version of Manor Lords. 

• New type of ranged soldier: crossbows. Iron parts are required to make them in the Blacksmith, which are made from Iron slabs;
• Trade overview;
• Fishing, complete with fishing ponds, freezing mechanics, development branch and the fisherman's hut;
• Butchers, able to slaughter sheep to gain meat. If supplied with salt, they can also make delicious sausages;
• Food spoiling mechanics (no more stockpiling tons of food!);
• Animal Pen upgrades on burgage plots will let you choose between goats and pigs. Pigs give 2x meat every 150 days, Goats give 1 meat + 1 hides every 150 days;
• Increased Ale production (1 Malt = 2 Ale);
• Ox ploughing is even more historically accurate;
• Change in resource deposit spawning: fishing ponds randomly replace berry deposits, salt deposits randomly replace iron deposits;
• Communal oven and Malthouse needs fuel too.

A screenshot of the Unreal Engine 5 version of Manor Lords, showcasing gorgeous water effects.

Of course, this new 0.8.004 version will include all changes, optimisations and fixes included in patch versions 0.7.987, 0.7.991, 0.7.995, 0.7.999 and 0.8.002. As well as all the changes, over 75 fixes will be released and tens of cosmetic updates.

You can read the full notes of each release over on Steam (all links point to their respective release announcements on Steam for easy clicking).

Available to download now

The previous publicly released patch of Manor Lords already dates back to version 0.7.975 on June 11th of this year. That seems like such a long time ago!

Since then, developers have been working on and releasing several beta patches. Unfortunately, things didn't go as planned and public releases were delayed. 

Most notably, all seemed to go downhill earlier this month with the release of beta patch 0.7.995. A startup crash appeared, but only on some selected PCs. 

It seemed to be related to the related to the new Unreal Engine 5 being introduced into the build. But the problem is: developers can't reproduce it. Even external testing companies haven't been able to reproduce the issue, making it extremely hard to pinpoint a cause and, ultimately, release a solution. 

With that in mind, the release of the main branch, which includes the Steam 'regular' game but also other platforms like Xbox Gamepass, has been postponed.

The latest patch notes for version 0.8.002, released last week on Friday, include several reasons why the crashes might have happened:

• Players forget they had mods installed, deleting the all mod traces fixes it.
• Players overclock their CPUs or GPUs (in cases of 13th and 14th gen Intel CPUs instability happens even with factory settings). Downclocking fixes it.
• Players set FPS to unlimited and/or settings too high and overheat their GPUs. For instance players report that limiting framerate, changing AA to FXAA or putting the laptop into a lower peformance mode fixes the crashes for them.
• Players using old GPU drivers. Installing newest drivers fixed it.
• One crash according to the player was fixed by him simply restarting his PC
• One crash according to the player was fixed by uninstalling the game, removing all leftover files and installing it again

In other words, all crashes seem to be user based, rather than an issue with the game itself. This is good news!

If we read through the lines, we already assumed that the developers had ruled out a game based error and could continue to finalise a new public release. 

And tonight, Hooded Horse finally posted the long awaited release announcement for patch 3 of Manor Lords on Steam and in their Discord channel. If you play on XBox for PC, they are using Early Access version 0.8.005 instead. 

And with all the new goodies coming into play, it should pull back a lot of players to try out all the improvements SlavicMagic and his team have made over the past 4 months.