Manor Lords: How to Get and Use Rooftiles

Manor Lords

By Chris Drumm

Published May 4, 2024

Manor Lords is a game about resource management, and some resources are more prestigious than others. Most basic structures need logs, while mid-tier buildings use planks and stones, and the top-tier buildings need rooftiles (also called clay tiles).

To make these tiles, you'll need to invest in a few buildings and hope that your home region has access to clay. You can still get clay through trade, but doing so is more expensive than gathering your own. Clay has no use on its own in Manor Lords, but the rooftiles you can make with it are essential to growing your towns.

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How to Gather Clay

The Mining Pit building is in the Mining tab of the building menu, which has a pickaxe for an icon. The Mining Pit only costs one log, but you need to build it on top of a clay or iron deposit. Unlike gathering huts and stonecutter huts, the Mining Pit has to overlap the deposit to work.

A regular clay deposit may hold a few hundred units of clay, but a rich deposit will have a couple thousand units. If you unlock and apply the Deep Mine development upgrade, your Mining Pit will always produce clay from a rich deposit even after the surface supply runs out.

If you start in a region without clay, or if a normal deposit runs out, you can still get the clay you need through trade. Just keep in mind that importing anything can get expensive fast, so you should also have at least one trade export to maintain your regional wealth.

How to Make Rooftiles

The next step of the process is to fire the raw clay into clay tiles. You can do so with a Clay Furnace, which is in the industry building tab. As the name suggests, the Clay Furnace will need fuel during every month it operates. However, it doesn't need extra fuel if more families are working here.

Peasant families who work at the furnace automatically gather clay from pits or from local storehouses and convert it into rooftiles. One unit of clay generates one unit of rooftiles. Once they're ready, the tiles will go right back into storage.

Where to Use Rooftiles

Not every resource in the 0.7 build of Manor Lords is equally important, but rooftiles are essential if you want the best burgage plots available. Specifically:

Upgrading a Burgage Plot from 2 to 3 costs four rooftiles.
Upgrading a Wooden Church to a Small Stone Church (which the Burgage Plot 3 upgrade requires) costs 10 rooftiles.

As you can see, the number of buildings that use clay tiles is low, but the benefits are high. A tier 3 Burgage Plot generates 2 regional wealth instead of 1, and they can hold double the number of worker families. Tier 3 Burgage Plots are also essential for upgrading your settlement level, and these levels give you access to development points that unlock powerful new buildings and abilities. Thus, while you can safely ignore clay deposits during the first few years, you should make a point to build a clay industry when your town expands.