With its tech debt settled, here's what's coming to Manor Lords next

The wait for new additions to Manor Lords is nearly over. After taking a pause on developing fresh features, buildings, and tools in order to ensure its fundamentals had the polish they needed, developer Slavic Magic has returned with a list of everything coming to the medieval city builder in its next update. Scheduled to hit beta testing before the month is out, it includes the likes of animal herding, cheesemaking, seasonal workplace schedules, and another map type.

"Let me yap a little bit about what's coming to Manor Lords soon," Lead Developer Greg Styczeń writes. "Since we pushed our technical refactors to main, we are now ready to start pushing new features to beta." At the top of the list is the division of structures across the board into 'basic' and 'advanced' tiers.

In order to make those in the latter category, you'll need to employ skilled builders at a Construction Yard. This facility includes multiple handcarts to move resources around, and can make use of Ox Carts to shift heavier loads (Styczeń adds that these now need to be manually loaded). Additionally, skilled builders will be able to construct basic-tier structures at a faster rate.

Building advanced structures "now takes much longer," but Slavic Magic has implemented more detail to bring the construction process to life. You'll see more scaffolds, cranes, and so on appearing and disappearing as the building work progresses, along with workers performing tasks such as carrying water from nearby wells and mixing mortar. All of these designs, as you'd expect, are based "on actual historical examples."

The ability to import and breed cows is being introduced. They'll live on pastures, and the former 'Sheep Farm' workers have been rebranded to 'Livestock Farm.' You can collect milk from your new animals, or butcher them for beef. Alongside this, the addition of a Cheesemonger artisan will offer another way to use the produce, "and gives us a cool base of a future perk, since we know regions are often famous for their cheeses."

Pastures require more effort than before, however - they'll now need an investment of planks and require building time, with the cost of construction scaling dynamically based on their size. Slavic Magic has implemented water shelters to the pastures "based on examples from manuscripts," and has also made improvements to livestock behavior. You'll need to feed them, too - enter oats, another new crop that's "easy to grow" and can be turned into animal feed, or used to make food for your town's inhabitants.

In order to simplify the amount of seasonal micromanagement needed, you can now set season-specific assignments for every workplace. The production and breeding cycles of both cows and sheep will also be influenced by seasons "to add a bit of realism."

Elsewhere, the update will bring a new map, where "two rivers meet in the middle of a wide-open valley." The long-awaited Large Stone Church will finally make its debut, and there will be storage filters introduced to trading posts, allowing you to manually set which particular types of goods they each handle.

This next Manor Lords beta is planned to go live on the testing branch by the end of July, and Slavic Magic hopes to have it available in the main game proper by the end of August. Once that's done, new development perks are next on the list. "Thank you for the patience," the team concludes.