Manor Lords gets its first big patch, with new taxes, animations and changes to trading

Harken to me, serfs! There's a big new patch for Manor Lords now available in beta testing for all players. Developer Greg Styczeń has blogged about it in depth. Yes, this is one of those update changelogs, the ones that keep on scrolling with hypnotic insistence till at last you tear your eyes away and look around and oh hell, it's night and why am I standing over this altar, holding a skewered doll?

Here are some highlights from that changelog: players can now trade between their own regions using Trading Posts, without needing Barter or Pack Stations. You can also now turn off trading with Free Merchants and Tradepoints for each good type, in case you only want to trade with certain regions, and the import display will adjust dynamically to show the lowest possible price to be found.

What Slavic Magic giveth they taketh away, however. There's a new kind of tax to worry about, the "Annual Royal Tax" or "King's Tax", which is collected from the Treasury once per year and calculated per resident. According to Styczeń, the new tax has been reintroduced from an earlier version and "should slightly punish bad workplace optimization and make it more difficult to hoard huge amounts of cash".

In still more uplifting news, there's now a visual representation for carrying corpses, and you can preview the game's 30-day mourning periods to better monitor the impact on productivity, you kindly soul, you.

The above additions and changes are but individual sheep in a mighty flock (the patch also tweaks animal behaviour so that they form a more convincing herd). In general, Styczeń comments, the patch is designed to address the below significant problems:

- The rate of Hildebolt's claims

- The famous "None" people spawning in huge numbers and refusing to do any work

- The clogged Trading Posts

- The game being stuck at the summary screen after a victory / game over

- Very weak archer damage

- Inefficient sawpits which also triggered "generic storage full" problem banners

- Problems with optimizations in large cities (still some work to do here)

- Inefficient marketplace supply

- Problems with farming, like crops erasing in the winter & inefficient harvests

- Too harsh oversupply/undersupply systems

- People and/or livestock staying homeless even though there is living space in the settlement

- Overly high ale consumption

I had to know more about these amazing Bartleby the Scrivener-esque "None" people with their evident healthy self-respect and freedom from materialist values. According to the full patch notes, they've been showing up in towns after raids. They "just stand around waiting forever and possibly crash the game while reloading", it seems. Heroes of the resistance! Perhaps we can get "None people" recognised as an official religion.

To access the patch, you will need to do these eight things in exactly this order: Open Steam; right-click on Manor Lords in your library; select Properties; go to BETAS tab; Enter the password: veryNiceBasket; choose "pre_release" from the "Beta participation" drop-down list; wait for the game to update the files (if nothing happens, restart the Steam client); and finally, launch the game.

A "sturdy and immersive builder that feels incomplete yet alive with promise", Nic summarised in our Manor Lords early access review. It certainly seems to be coming along nicely post-launch. You can read more on the subject in my recent interview with publisher Hooded Horse.