Hit city-builder Manor Lords has been updated with two new maps and a heap of changes

Slavic Magic and Hooded Horse have released a new Manor Lords update, adding a couple of maps, the ability to construct bridges, and a bevy of smaller features to an already quite robust medieval city builder.

The update rolls together two beta patches into one, gargantuan changelog. Teased last November, the new maps are High Peaks and Winding River. The latter is obviously where the bridge-building mechanic – an extension of the existing road tool – gets its chance to shine.

Bridge-building is, I imagine, also helped along by some tweaks to the game’s cliff geography. Posting on Steam, lead developer Greg Styczeń writes that it should be clearer which areas are buildable or traversable, thanks to a zigzag pattern that appears during build mode. He’s also tweaked the pathfinding around cliffs, and got rid of a problem where gaps would appear between landscape components and cliffs when you zoom out.

Other major changes include worker restrictions for stalls. As of this patching, only storage building workers can set up marketplace stalls, because “there was too much confusion about who owned what and works where, and it was very difficult for players to understand, for instance, that a gravedigger could have a food stall,” the developer goes on. Sorry gravediggers, but you’ll have to flog your homegrown produce by other means. The number of goods a marketplace can supply is also now capped by the number of stalls (and therefore, assigned storage buildings), with capacity indicated on the market panel.

Styczeń has also introduced a stone well upgrade for wells, along with level two taverns, while changing how ale and water are distributed from wells and taverns.

This is but the tip of the update’s acrid compost heap. By all means click that Steam link and fill your horrified eyes with bulletpoints. Sometimes when I read an overly long changelog, I can feel myself… changelogging in turn. My brain starts to feel like a village marketplace, crowded with boisterous oxen and sorrowful gravediggers, hopelessly offering handfuls of turnips to anybody who will take them.

Manor Lords launched in April last year, and was due to remain in early access for approximately one year. Using such braincells as I have left that aren’t now wholly given over to talk of bowyers, burgage plots and butchery, I deduce from this that it might leave early access in April 2025. If you’d like to learn more about how publishers Hooded Horse manage their early access projects, check out our interview with one of the company’s founders.