Hi everyone!
Tim here, CEO of Manor Lords publisher Hooded Horse. I'm checking in to bring some news of the upcoming update. My apologies for being a bit late with this news post -- so my plan is to check in here once a month, unless there's a new update released or about to be released to either beta or main. And we've been in a bit of a holding pattern here, because the latest update has been in a cycle of QA testing, us thinking the build is just about ready for beta testing release to all of you, and then discovering some problems requiring fixes, for a couple weeks (we always test the new builds including with a professional QA firm before they go out to public beta testing, to try to fix as many bugs as possible, though of course they never find quite as much as beta playtesting reveals).
So I made the bad judgement call of thinking, oh it's a few days away, I'll just wait for the update, a few times over, as we kept finding stuff to fix. My apologies for that, I should have just dropped in a news post instead regardless of what I expected to happen, and checked in with all of you.
And that's what I'm doing here -- the update itself is likely very soon, so I hope no one minds the multiple messages in rapid succession, but I didn't want to take any chance of not getting something to you now. Going forward I'm going to assume the unexpected and just leave a post here once we get to that time, unless the update has already just occurred or is being prepared right then, to ensure I don't repeat my mistake and we get news to you regardless. With that out of the way, we've got some detailed reports from the dev team below.
Note this update is very technically focused on improving how the game functions under the hood, with pathfinding a major focus:
Pathfinding Refactor
We decided to revisit pathfinding due to mounting technical and gameplay concerns. On the AI side, inefficiencies in how distances were being calculated started to impact performance while collision and navigation issues were undermining the reliability of core systems like worker behavior and unit movement.
Rather than continuing to stack fixes on top of fixes as we had been doing, we made the call to step back and address the root of the problem. That meant reworking how units evaluate space, navigate around obstacles, and recover when something goes wrong.
It also meant taking a hard look at systems that had quietly degraded over time. In some cases, behavior that once worked well had become unreliable through iteration, and needed to be rebuilt to match the current state of the game.
While this was a detour from the main plan of development, it affects every facet of the game going forward and we feel the result has been worth it. As you’ll see later after the update's release from the patch notes, there’s a considerable amount of fixes for cases where characters or animals became stuck, blocked entrances or failed to move, especially in and around castles or tight spaces. Merchants are more reliable, Oxen move more smoothly when plowing, troop movement on roads is more natural, and so on.
And second, we do have some news where all of your feedback influenced the development plans:
What about the “Trade Rework”?
In our January blog post, we talked about one of the Trade Rework concepts we’d been discussing behind the scenes. The idea was to be open about it early, put it in front of the community, and see how people felt. The point of sharing it early was to see what you thought.
The general reception was quite positive, though much of the feedback discussed the need for a rework in the first place, and wondered why we’d spend time changing it now when there are other features people are asking for more loudly. And we think that’s a fair reaction.
Our thinking at the time was that, if trade was going to change, it probably made sense to do that before building perks on top of it. That way, perks could be designed around a stronger version of the system, with more room for interesting choices and new mechanics. The concern was that if we built perks around the current trade system first, it would become much harder to revisit trade later. At that point, changing trade would also mean undoing anything that had been built on top of it.
After considering all the feedback however, we’ve decided to hold back the trade perks and the potential rework a little while longer, and instead focus on “Rural Traditions” as the next set of perks. These are typically focused on enhancing your local resources via upgrades to buildings or improved techniques which allow you to further specialize in a deeper way early on. There’s far less need for reworked mechanics with these, though Farming is something we feel has room to become more rich, and we know players are missing things like “Early Harvest” so we’re looking at improving and expanding farming alongside the introduction of “Rural Traditions”.
This will be a bit longer ahead in the plans (the update in testing right now to be released soon is focussed on pathfinding and bugfixes) but we wanted to get the news to you now of where we intend to go with this, and how your feedback influenced that.
That's it for today's post! As said, I'll do better and not make the same mistake, so in June unless a new update is coming right then in June (or just released) I'll make sure to check in again regardless of what I expect to happen. Thanks everyone for playing and being part of Manor Lords development!
Tim
