How to Build Your Second Settlement

May 9, 2024

When you begin a game of Manor Lords, you start out with five homeless families and a few free resources, and you must figure out how to use them to become a thriving town. To help with this, each region in the game comes with several large woods, fertile fields, and resources like clay, iron, and berries.

However, you don’t have to concentrate on a single region when playing Manor Lords. In fact, you shouldn’t, at least if you want to complete the “Restoring the Peace” scenario. While you don’t need to build a settlement in every region you claim, the extra resources you can get from them can be very handy when you have to face the baron’s final army.

A Manor Lords player stumbles upon a hilarious bug, capturing the attention of other players and sparking amusing conversations among them.

How to Start a Second Settlement

The first thing you need when you plan on building a second settlement is ownership of a second region on the map. This will cost you 1,000 Influence if the region is unclaimed, or 2,000 Influence if the rival baron owns it. You’ll also need to beat the baron’s army, since he never lets a claim go unchallenged. You can also use a resource called King’s Favor, but as of the 0.7 build, this resource doesn’t yet exist.

The second thing you need is Personal Wealth, which is how you fund the second settlement. The way you gain Personal Wealth is by building a Manor, going to the Manor’s Taxation tab, and setting “Land Taxes” to 10 percent or higher. Land taxes allow you to take a percentage of the standing Regional Wealth. Your approval rating drops fast when you demand taxes, so remember to turn them off when your treasury is full.

Once you have at least 250 Personal Wealth, and you own at least two regions, you can choose to build a Settler’s Camp from the Administration tab of the construction menu. This brings up the Settlement Options, which gives you a few choices. First, you can choose to specialize the new settlement (not implemented in 0.7, but this probably gives you a different set of starting resources), and then you can choose to invest more Personal Wealth into the project. For each extra 250 you spend, you get:

20 more Bread, Firewood, and Stone
8 more Timber
10 more Metal Tools
50 more Regional Wealth

However, you’ll always start out with five families and one ox, no matter how much money you spend.

After deciding what to spend, you can set down the settlement tent in any owned but unoccupied region in the game. From this point on, you’ll need to juggle the needs and jobs of each active settlement you own.

Featured image showcasing brewery and malthouse

The ale-making process in Manor Lords isn’t very straightforward. Read this guide for step-by-step instructions on producing ale.

Second Settlement Tips

Don’t forget the lessons your first settlement taught you: start with the two storage buildings, then build a Hunting Camp and Forager Hut, follow up with the Logging Camp and Woodcutter’s Lodge, and only then start to worry about setting up Burgage Plots.
Settlements don’t have to be adjacent to one another. Your second settlement can be on the opposite side of the map from your first, and your third settlement can be distant from both. However, building settlements close to each other is useful, since trade between regions can happen faster, and militia units can show up sooner.
Another benefit to adjacent settlements is that you can build shortcuts that cross regional borders.
To enable trade between settlements, build a Pack Station from the logistics tab. In the Pack Station’s menu, you can choose a target region to trade with, then which resource you want to send and receive. Note that you can only trade resources, never Regional Wealth, and the game decides how much each resource is worth. For instance, one unit of planks is worth two units of stone, and that’s what your traders will exchange.
You can buy a mule to work at a Pack Station. A trader with a mule can exchange a lot more resources than one without a mule.
Destination settlements don’t need a Pack Station of their own to complete an exchange. Traders will walk straight up to the storage or granary buildings that contain the resources you sent them to collect. However, multiple Pack Stations will speed up the exchange process, especially since each one can only employ a single family.
The best resource to exchange with a new settlement is planks. You can use planks to build a number of effective buildings and upgrades, and saving the Sawpit for later will let you spend your lumber and ox time on other projects.
The best resource for a new settlement to give is tools. At least in the 0.7 build, you don’t need to use tools to build anything, and you can get a lot of planks for each one. Any resource that comes from a Rich Deposit is also good for bartering.
Try to avoid starting your second settlement until after every region on the map is owned by either you or Baron Hildebolt. Bandits stop stealing resources once they have nowhere to hide, and this takes a lot of pressure off your new settlement.
No matter how many regions or settlements you own, you can only maintain up to six militia units. Retinues you create before you reach six count for this cap, but retinues you create after reaching six units can go over this cap.
Once you have two settlements that can trade back and forth, you don’t have to rely on one region to craft every resource. This means you can specialize each town based on their local Rich Deposits, and then use Pack Stations to trade surplus resources back and forth.

Managing several settlements can be a headache, especially when harvest time rolls around. However, the extra resources, income, militia units, and influence you can get from two or more settlements is well worth the effort it takes to maintain them.