Manor Lords: Best Village Layout

Manor Lords

By Chris Drumm

Published May 12, 2024

Manor Lords isn't a traffic simulator like Cities: Skylines, and busy streets aren't a problem outside of the occasional oxen logjam. However, distances are important when everyone has to walk to their job and back.

That's what makes village layouts important. When workers don't have to walk as far, they can spend more time doing their jobs and collecting the items they need for their homes. A good layout also includes plenty of room for backyard upgrades, because certain upgrades produce more resources when the backyard is bigger. So, with the right layout, your Manor Lords town will produce more than enough food for every citizen.

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Supply Hubs

The biggest thing you can do to improve the layout of a town in Manor Lords is create hubs around all the buildings that store resources. These buildings are:

Granary
Storehouse
Marketplace
Farmhouse
Logging Camp

You can then surround these buildings with all the structures that use the resources, generate resources that go into these buildings, or both. There are a few things to understand about how these resource buildings work:

Resource generators like Mining Pits and Foraging Huts tend to send their resources straight to Storehouses, even if industrial buildings that use their resources are currently running. This means you should place these industrial buildings (Bloomeries, Clay Furnace, Weaver's Workshop, etc.) close to the Storehouse hub, not close to the resource buildings.
Some buildings need a resource from one storage area and craft something stored elsewhere. For instance, the Sawpit turns Timber into Planks, and the Dyer's Workshop turns Berries into Dyes. If your hub areas are far apart, you may want to place these buildings between the storage areas.
Crops go to the Farmhouse first, then Granary and Storehouse workers take them to their final homes. Flax and Barley go to the Storehouse despite being crops, while Grain and Flour goes to the Granary despite being crafting materials.
Marketplaces store goods that Burgage Plots consume. The farther a plot's front door is from the Marketplace, the more often it'll run low on resources. Your best bet is to create rings of Burgage Plots around a central Marketplace. Make sure each ring faces in: anyone can walk through a home's backyard, not just its residents, so the second ring of residents won't have to walk to the nearest spoke road.
Something else about Marketplaces is that citizens will tend to fill the first Marketplace up before they start setting up stalls in other Marketplace locations. If you want two Marketplaces in a single region, make sure the first one is too small for all the market stalls the town has (destroy it and redraw it if you have to), and only then build your second Marketplace.
Unlike the Marketplace, the Church and the Tavern can satisfy Burgage Plots in a wide radius around them. Feel free to build them at the edges of your housing district.
Storehouse workers will bring a variety of goods to their Storehouse even if they aren't the closest location. If you want a Storehouse or Granary to focus on a specific resource, go to the Advanced tab of their building menu and choose all the good you want the building's workers to reject. This won't cause the workers to move the goods inside the building to a new location, but it will stop them from grabbing new goods of the wrong type.
If your market needs more firewood stalls, build a Storehouse that refuses all Linen, Yarn, Leather, Boots, Cloaks, and Clothes.

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Burgage Plot Sizes

The flexible Burgage Plot tool lets you build houses of various sizes. Depending on the width and length of the plot, you can give a single plot enough space for a building expansion, a backyard extension, or both.

For most backyard expansions, the size of the backyard doesn't matter. None of the artisan upgrades work more efficiently with a larger backyard, and you don't get more chickens or goats when you add more space. However, the backyard size is very important when it comes to Vegetables and Apples. For both extensions, larger yards will give you more produce.

This makes it a good idea to build Burgage Plots with a mix of sizes. A few large yards can support orchards and vegetable gardens, while smaller yards allow you to build a second ring of Burgage Plots close to the central Marketplace. You can also build plots only big enough for a single house, but this is a waste of potential resources and artisans. Make sure every plot has the backyard extension symbol before you build a set.

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Homes and Workplaces

Another important consideration is where people live compared to where they work. Your workers spend part of their time at home, at the pub, hawking wares in the Marketplace, and otherwise waiting for a chance to do their jobs somewhere near their homes. This means you can save a lot of time by building workplaces and Burgage Plots close together.

However, you have no real control over which family works at which workplace. Each time you turn off a seasonal job, each time you juggle workers, and each time you fire a family to make them focus on construction, Manor Lords chooses which family ends up where at random. The game doesn't have a workplace experience tracker (at least not in version 0.7), and so any family can do any job equally well.

What this means is that you can't guarantee that a family living close to a workplace will be the family that works there. Instead, the game may choose a family that works at the far end of the region instead, and the family that lives close by may have another job at the other end of town. Because of this, you should try to build a single residential hub and surround it with workplaces. This is the best way to limit how far a worker has to walk to get to and from their home.

The one exception to this problem is the artisan. Families that live in homes with artisan extensions always work at home, and they never join the general labor pool. However, they still need to gather goods from Storehouses and Granaries, and they still need to keep their home stocked with food, fuel, and clothing goods, so the same rules and restrictions apply.

In short, here's what to do to create the best village layouts:

Treat storage buildings as hubs, and build outwards from each one.
In particular, build a Marketplace at the center of your town, and build Burgage Plots in rings facing inwards.
Create a few large backyards for orchards and vegetable gardens, but keep the rest just big enough to build backyard extensions.
Treat your housing district as a larger hub for the rest of your town.