Is Manor Lords multiplayer or co-op?

By Jesse Lennox Updated July 29, 2024

Two armies clash in Manor Lords. — Slavic Magic

You can easily lose hours designing your village and appeasing your citizens in Manor Lords all by yourself. There are so many different avenues to achieve victory, but the only competition or help you can normally find is in the form of NPCs. Other factions around the map can be helpful or harmful depending on how you play, but what if you wanted to team up with a friend to combine resources, or perhaps compete to see who can crush the other first? Many strategy and city builders thrive on multiplayer components, but does Manor Lords offer those same modes? Make sure you know the answer before making your purchase if that’s your intention.

Is there multiplayer or co-op in Manor Lords?

To cut to the chase, the answer is no. Manor Lords is a purely single-player experience through and through. There are no cooperative or competitive modes in the game at all, so there’s no way to interact with anyone else either on PC or console. This game was just released out of early access, and there is plenty of content on the way, however, we regret to inform you that multiplayer is not in the plans for the time being.

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One developer took to the Steam forums to release an FAQ on the game. One question specifically asked if there is any multiplayer or cooperative gameplay in the game. The response said that “he focus is on a refined single-player experience, with no multiplayer or cooperative modes planned at the moment.”

That doesn’t mean multiplayer is off the table forever, but it at least isn’t something the team is working on or thinking about adding in the near future. Should we learn any news about a multiplayer mode in the future, we will update this article accordingly.

Jesse Lennox has been a writer at Digital Trends for over four years and has no plans of stopping. He covers all things…

Gaming

Is Manor Lords on console?

A snowy settlement in Manor Lords.

It's kind of hard to believe that a substantial game like Manor Lords could be developed by only one person, but that hasn't stopped it from being an absolutely massive success since its April 26 release date. Rising rapidly to become the top-selling game on Steam and hitting a staggering number of concurrent players, this Early Access strategy title is certainly making a name for itself right out of the gate. However, despite being such a popular game on Steam and PC Game Pass, some players may be wondering if and when they can get their hands on it for consoles. It's currently a tricky question to answer, but here's what we know so far about whether Manor Lords will come to consoles.
Is Manor Lords on console?
Manor Lords is not currently available on any consoles. That doesn't mean we won't see this successful game make its way over to additional platforms, though. In early May 2024, developer Greg Styczeń confirmed on Twitter that he's working with publisher Hooded Horse to bring Manor Lords to Xbox "as soon as possible." While we don't know how soon that will actually be, it seems that Microsoft's console will at least receive the game at some point in the (hopefully) near future.

When asked about a possible PlayStation 5 version of Manor Lords in the same Twitter thread, Styczeń stated: "We're still talking about it." This may mean a potential PS5 release could be much further out than the Xbox version. And given Styczeń's silence about a Nintendo Switch release, it's not looking particularly likely that it will receive a version of Manor Lords at all — though only time will tell.

Gaming

The best developments to get first in Manor Lords

A town in a valley in Manor Lords.

It feels a little bit like cheating in Manor Lords, but the development upgrades you can get can do some powerful things to improve your settlement. However, to balance things out, the development points you need to unlock these enhancements are given out very sparingly. In fact, you won't get even close to the amount needed to unlock everything on the sphere grid. To make matters even more stressful, there's no way to undo a choice you make, so any point spent in error is locked in until you start a new game. There's none that can make your game harder, but if you pick one that offers no benefit to your current settlement or goals, it might as well be a negative in terms of the opportunity cost. For the best experience, here are the developments you should invest in first.
How to get development points
Before you can spend any development points in Manor Lords, you have to earn them. This is a slightly obfuscated system that you may not fully understand if you're not paying close attention, but it does make sense once you know what's going on. Development points are tied to you reaching new settlement levels. You can incrementally grow to a small village, a medium village, a large village, a small town, a medium town, and -- finally -- a large town. Each one requires a larger number of burgage plots and for you to upgrade more of them to higher levels. In any one settlement, you can earn six development points.
Best developments to get first

The development tree is broken down into four segments: farming, trade, gathering, and industry. Here are some of the best ones you can unlock early.
Heavy Plow
No settlement can survive only on hunting and foraging for food. Farming is the only way to make sure your storehouses are well stocked with food, but even a fully staffed farm is painfully slow to harvest. The Heavy Plow upgrade adds a plowing station to your farms so you can make use of an ox to not only make plowing your fields far faster, but also tospeed up transporting your crops to the storehouse.
Charcoal Burning
Preparing for winter is your primary concern for your first year, if not the first two, in Manor Lords. Lack of food is one thing, but if you run out of fuel to keep your population warm, they won't last long. Firewood is your basic form of fuel, but it is very inefficient. This development lets you build a charcoal kiln that gives you two charcoal for every one firewood you feed into it. That will double your potential fuel reserves in a snap.
Deep Mining
All natural resources will eventually run dry. While you can regrow trees and let berries regrow, ore deposits only have so much material for you to mine before they're tapped out. You can break the laws of nature with the Deep Mining development that lets you upgrade any mine into a deep mine that somehow never runs out of ore. This only works on the slightly rare rich deposits, but is still incredibly powerful to have an unending source of ore to build or sell.
Sheepbreeding
Speaking of getting an unending source of materials and money, Sheepbreeding makes something that you would expect to happen, but by default does not, actually occur. If you have a sheep farm, those sheep will be completely uninterested in mating and having more sheep babies. Snag this development to let nature take its course and get yourself an infinite supply of sheep for materials and to trade for quite a high price.
Better Deals
And while you're trading, unlock better deals to keep from getting ripped off. There's a tariff on anything you import in Manor Lords of 10 regional wealth, but this perk waives that annoying fee. Since you never quite know what resources you will have and what you will need to import to build your next structure or upgrade, importing is essential for reaching the late game. The earlier you invest in this, the more you'll save in the long run.

Computing

Manor Lords performance guide: best settings, recommended specs, and more

Running around a Manor Lords village in third-person.

Manor Lords is the most wish-listed game on Steam at the time of this writing, and from my early impressions, it's an excellent medieval village management simulator. It's like Banished, but taken up a notch. But as impressive and fun as it is already, it's still an Early Access game, which means getting it to run at its best requires a little finesse with the settings.

But you don't need to spend hours painstakingly adjusting your seeings and benchmarking the game, because we've done that for you! After our rigorous testing, we've found the best settings for Manor Lords to give you peak performance so you can enjoy the grubby details of this dark ages setting.
The best settings for Manor Lords
Manor Lords is an immersive single-player experience, so while our settings recommendations are designed to improve performance beyond just setting everything to the maximum or leaving them at defaults, we aren't going to make major sacrifices to visual quality just for a few frames per second (fps).