New Manor Lords update leaves players "seriously impressed" as beloved city builder drops to lowest-ever price on Steam

It's easy to forget that Manor Lords was created by just one man. When it first started, developer Slavic Magic was the name for Grzegorz Styczeń's solo studio. Since the game's success - it's a regular feature on our list of the best city building games - he's expanded to hire more developers, but the team remains small. However, Styczeń excels in listening to the community, and the latest update is no different. It makes numerous quality of life improvements and fixes so many bugs that I barely know where to start.

Manor Lords releases a beta test for all of its updates, and 0.8.046 is no different. Where this patch does differ, though, is the sheer scope of it. By my count, there are over 350 fixes bundled into this mammoth update, and many of them fix our biggest issues with the game.

The most important changes affect resources, maintenance, and storage. These are all interlinked, but impact everything differently. When collecting resources with the firewood cutter and logging camp, you can now check a box to protect a certain resource area, which makes your workers automatically skip deforesting areas near vulnerable resources.

Maintenance calculation has changed from 'time since' to a standard 'durability counter,' which helps circumvent some cheesing methods, and there's now a chance your workers will get injured or even die if buildings are ill-maintained. The final major update tweaks Granary and Warehouse worker behavior, and storage workers can supply their stalls from storage buildings only.

Elsewhere, there are balance changes, a host of updates to the game's AI, and nearly 150 bug fixes. Cosmetics, optimization, audio, and UI have also been looked at.

It's no surprise that this has gone down extremely well with players. One Steam user says that it's updates like these that show the team "loves what they're working on" and that they are "seriously impressed."

Manor Lords is currently on sale for $25.99 / £22.74, matching its lowest ever price. If you want to see the patch notes in full and learn how to install the beta, you can find them here.

Being a beta update, there's every chance that some fixes won't work perfectly at first, or will introduce new, unforeseen bugs to the game. However, the serious size of this update is a statement of intent from Slavic Magic, and hopefully the most egregious problems will be addressed before the update is fully released. For now, though I can't wait to get into a fresh playthrough where my oxen will transport timber to the nearest recipient, rather than whichever one their bovine brains decide is most worthy.