Ewe wool love this: new Manor Lords patch means your farm 'no longer spawns sheep exponentially'

(Image credit: Slavic Magic)

If you were a medieval sheep farmer you'd probably be thrilled to discover new sheep magically appearing in your field every time you turned around. Wool for weeks, right? Your enthusiasm might begin to falter, though, right around the time you oversaturated the market to the point that wool was essentially worthless, not to mention you now had fields completely overstuffed with rapidly multiplying sheep.

That's one of the problems in early access city builder Manor Lords: exponential sheep spawning and no way to stop it, leading to a rather baaaaaad sheep-to-citizen ratio. A fix is here at last, capping the sheep spawning rate to 1 calf every 10 days, max, which should make your farms considerably more manageable and prevent the wool market from completely cratering.

That's just one of the many fixes in the patch, which is getting a trial run on a new Manor Lords experimental branch before it ships to the main game. According to the patch notes you can now also "hire 6 militia squads even if you already have retinue and mercenaries employed," and "trading got a lot of fixes, with on foot traders now being able to carry 5 items per trip." Another interesting change to check out: players now have the "ability to disallow setting up stalls on the marketplace for certain families or workplaces." This was an issue because some citizens would end up spending most of their time at a market stall selling their home-grown vegetables instead of working their actual jobs.

There's lots more in the patch, including changes to fields and harvesting, barter and trading, construction, and more. If you want to check out the new patch for yourself, there are a few easy steps you'll need to complete first—and keep in mind, this patch is currently only available on the Steam version of Manor Lords, not the PC Game Pass version.

To join the Manor Lords experimental branch, do the following:

First, backup your saved games. You'll find them here: C:\Users\*your user name*\AppData\Local\ManorLords\Saved\SaveGames

Then:

Right-click on Manor Lords in your Steam library
Select Properties, then Betas
In the Private Betas field, enter the following password:
veryNiceBasket
Click "check code"
Click "opt into: pre_release"

You can then close that window. The game will begin updating to the experimental version.

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.