How to place roads in Manor Lords

Want to place roads in Manor Lords? As your tiny encampment evolves into a small village and eventually a large town in Manor Lords, you're going to need to build roads to keep your population well-connected.

Roadbuilding in Manor Lords is a surprisingly satisfying part of the game, adding both an aesthetic flair that personalises your community while also influencing the speed of your hardworking peasants. But it's also possible to miss roads entirely, or stumble over figuring out the best ways of laying them down once you've constructed a crowded settlement. For a best practices primer on how to place roads in Manor Lords, look no further.

Manor Lords - Release Date Announcement Trailer

How to place roads in Manor Lords

To place a road in Manor Lords, click on the Roads button on the botton of your screen or press R. A marker will show up on your map indicating your road point, and you need to snap this to another road point to construct a full road.

You can adjust the curvature of your road with your Ctrl key, and you can also tweak the pathways of roads or have them weave around buildings by experimenting with your road points. If you accidentally set down roads you don't like, you can hold Alt and right mouse click to remove them.

When thinking about laying down roads and how they affect gameplay, it's important to know the following:

• Roads are technically not required for your peasants, who will go about their jobs as normal with or without them.
• Roads do increase the pathfinding and speed of your peasants, who will default to following a road if one exists nearby. Since you presumably want a productive town rather than a meandering one, figure out the most direct routes for peasants who need to make regular trips to important centres like the Granary and the Marketplace. If you've got a faroff structure, like a Hunting Camp by the edge of a forest, connect it to your main settlement with a road posthaste.
• Travelling merchants only follow roads. If you want to facilitate easy trade, you need roads by the edge of your controlled territory to facilitate the travel of merchants from other lands to your town.
• Roads start out skinny and increase in size the more traffic they receive. So if you're laying down a new road and don't like the way it looks, just be patient.

Those are the basics for laying down roads in Manor Lords. As you dig paths throughout your growing village, be sure to check out our other guides for everything you need to know on how to increase your Population, how to get Influence, and how to get Regional Wealth. If you're mostly concerned with the aesthetics of your town and how all of those roads look up close, see our guide to playing Manor Lords in third person.