Hi all,

You can now access a new experimental branch of Manor Lords (0.7.987).

Saves:To avoid any potential issues, it’s recommended to make a backup of your save files before switching to a beta version.

Mods: Please remove any mods you have before beginning a new save to ensure you can play without interference from an outdated mod.

To find your saves on Steam for Manor Lords.

• Press Win + E
  
• Paste %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\ManorLords\Saved\SaveGames into the search bar.

If you'd like to try it, please follow these steps:

• Open Steam
  
• Right-click on Manor Lords in your library
  
• Select Properties
  
• Go to the BETAS tab
  
• Enter the password: veryNiceBasket
  
• Choose "pre_release" from the "Beta participation" drop-down list
  
• Wait for the game to update the files (if nothing happens, restart the Steam client)
  
• Launch the game

All new strings might not be localized yet, and stability hasn't yet been thoroughly tested. Some balancing changes are still experimental.

To discuss this, please join the official Discord server https://discord.gg/manorlords. You'll find a channel specifically for discussing the ongoing pre_release branch.

Beta Patch Feedback Forum
We've also made a specific feedback forum for this beta patch. It'll help organize your feedback to make it easier for us to read your thoughts.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1363080/discussions/5/

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Unfortunately, we faced a moment when Unreal Engine 4 (the engine Manor Lords was using) was no longer officially supported. This meant that some bugs and crashes, including one randomly happening on a loading screen and one bug where the game would brick when changing resolutions to uneven numbers, would not be fixed. The SDKs for console development also were getting outdated and would likely not pass certification. Therefore, we decided we had to update Unreal Engine 5. The process was supposed to be easy on paper. Still, as usual, in practice, there were a ton of tiny changes and a ton of little things broke, from particle systems, texture compression, and physics simulation to button padding (yes, practically every single button in the game had to be manually fixed cause they all got stretched).

• The old engine bugs mentioned above are gone
  
• A lot of engine systems were refined. So, if you place roads, the road mask no longer flickers.
  
• Tesselation was removed from the engine, so the snow distortion resolution is slightly lower than it was, but it should still look fine.
  
• I experimented with Lumen (the new lighting system). Still, I found the lighting to look the same or (in some particular situations) worse for this specific type of game (no interiors, camera often super high up), all while costing performance. I decided to leave it disabled in the end.
  
• We haven't tested Nanite yet since there was not enough time for thorough performance testing
  
• I tested the new shadow system (VSM). It gives beautiful, sharp shadows, but during testing, I noticed that the performance depends on the sun's angle. So, while it works fine without a day and night cycle, fps drops massively when the sun moves it, especially during sunset. I left it in for now, but I'm unsure if it should be kept.
  
• I implemented Epic's new volumetric clouds. They are more dramatic than the system I was using before (the one by Harry "deBug" Emelianov"), and they interact more naturally with other systems like fog. They might be slightly heavier to render so up to the community to decide whether it's worth it, so far the closed alpha vote was to keep them. There is still room for art direction, but I didn't want to spend too much time on it.
  
• Some calculations (instanced LODs specifically) were moved from CPU to GPU, which should make end-game performance smoother.

Now to the stuff that matters:

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Fishing Ponds may now randomly spawn on the map with a "Shoal of Fish" Resource Node.
There is a new building called Fisherman's Hut, which does what you imagine.
The pond freezes in the winter, and a Development Branch called "Winter Fishing" must keep using it.

Fish multiply in the spring months only, based on the current population number (similar to wild animals), and therefore can be overfished. A fishing limit was added to make avoiding it easier.

When droughts occur, ponds shrink, and the fish population is capped at 50% of its maximum capacity.

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You can check all transactions for every Region and see your overall trade balance.

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A Butcher's Shop artisan conversion was added. Butchers can take surplus livestock and convert it into Meat.

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Food and certain crops will now spoil. Every type of food has a separate monthly spoilage rate; for instance, fish spoil faster than bread. Different buildings also have different spoilage rate reductions, the large granary being the best. Contrary to the Discord vote, we decided to risk it and represent rates by words rather than numbers since the new game designer working on the game (Darren) wanted to try it, arguing that not knowing the specific number is better for immersion and the player cannot react to such granularity between what is "low" and "very low" for instance. But if it poses a problem, we could restore the % values.
Random Salt Deposits were added. Salt can turn Meat into Sausages in the Butcher's Shop and significantly reduce its spoilage.

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All workplaces can now set production limits. Furthermore, different reserves can be set for different types of produce. For instance, you can set a separate Planks Reserve for Shields and Bows, allowing for more nuanced prioritization.

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Crossbows can now be produced in the Bowyer's Workshop and then used to equip Crossbow Militias. There also is a new mercenary company, "The Huntsmen," who are professional crossbowmen.

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You may notice that spring is now more green and less brownish. The main menu was reworked to be more historically accurate. The ox now bends when turning. Some animations got polished. There are also new leader portraits and coat of arms symbols to play with.

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We have spent a lot of time optimizing the CPU usage for late-game situations with multiple towns and hundreds of inhabitants and optimizing the loading times for those hefty saves.


Slowly but steadily, we are improving the in-game Wiki and cleaning up all the tooltips. You will now find new entries in the Wiki that should help explain, for example, what a "Family" is in the game's context.


We fixed a lot of bugs, including a few frequently requested by the community (like hunting camp being bugged or snowflakes not being visible on AMD GPUs)

Full changelog (Version 0.7.975 -> Version 0.7.987 )

Major changes:

-Upgraded the game to run on Unreal Engine 5:
a) A lot of old engine bugs and crashes should no longer occur, including random crashes during loading a saved game or certain resolutions breaking the game
b) [Experimental] A new "virtual shadow map" system that produces very sharp, high resolution shadows
d) New volumetric clouds and atmosphere rendering
e) GPU based LOD for Instanced Components

-Added a trade overview in the development screen which lists all the previous transactions done by the region

-Food spoilage mechanic:
a) Each food type decays at a certain rate per month, for instance fish decay faster than bread
b) Certain buildings affect spoilage, for instance storing in a granary is better than storing in the workplace's pantry
C) Weather events can affect spoilage rates (droughts make food spoil quicker)

-Fishing:
a) Added a new resource node: Fishing pond,
b) Made so that the ponds freeze in the winter
c) Added a new development branch: Winter fishing, that enables fishing all year round
e) Added a new food resource: Fish
f) Added a new workplace: Fisherman's hut, with new job (fisherman)

-Crossbows:
a) Added a new military resource: Crossbows (made in bowyer workshop)
b) Added new unit types: Light Mercenary Crossbowmen and Militia Crossbowmen
c) Added a new ranged low tier mercenary group: "The huntsmen"

-Butchers
a) Implemented the butcher artisan conversion. Butchers take surplus sheep and lamb and convert them into meat
b) Added new deposit (salt) and readded the salt resource which is mined with the surface/deep mine
c) Added a new resource: Sausage (1 salt + 1 meat = 2 sausage). It is made in the Butcher workshop and has much lower spoilage rate than Meat.

-Added a system of production limits and reserves for workplaces crafting goods

-Removed the individual limits (construction limit, hunting limit) and rerouted everything to the new reserve UI in the "advanced" tab. This way, Fisherman huts now also get a fishing limit to avoid overfishing.

Gameplay & Balance:
-Adjusted deposit spawning, should be (per region): 1 clay, 1 iron, 1 deer, 1 berries, 1 stone + 1 random, then either 2 of them or 1 and farming fertility get promoted to a rich deposit
-Brought rich deposits closer to the starting camp on first spawn (if possible) to make the starts a little bit more balanced
-Added a Pantry to the Malthouse
-Malthouse now actually requires refueling
-Advanced Skinning development branch doubles the Meat from butchers as well
-First butcher workshop built will set a sheep & lamb reserve automatically to a half of the population in order to avoid butchering the whole flock

Minor changes:
-Rewrote the random node algorithm to reduce cases where it fails to find an appropriate spot and spawns an object in a wrong location (eg. spawning a bandit camp on top of a pond)
-Added multiple paragraph breaks to wiki descriptions
-A setting was added to display Resource Node (Deposit) icons in construction mode only.
-Made "advanced" tab highlight every time an artisan workshop is created so that the player notices the new settings of production focus and reserve for butchers
-[Experimental] A new way of spawning bandit camps that is more randomized and should now avoid spawning them on top of ponds
-[Experimental] Moved production focus to the "advanced" building panel tab and livestock assignment to the "livestock" building panel tab
-Added missing Lambs icon
-Wiki text and tooltip updates
-Fish pond water level should lower during droughts
-Added drought impact to the spoilage tooltip
-Added new coat of arms symbols
-Added new character portraits
-Lowered the interface scale on smaller resolutions to reduce the top region panel overlapping with the lord's panel & screen edge.
-Improved collision avoidance if two characters are already extremely near collision distance or in collision

Optimization:
-Added advanced culling for transform updates (should make high population sessions run much faster)
-[Experimental] Fireplace light simulation LOD added
-[Experimental] Optimization of surface checks and fire reaction checks
-[Experimental] Optimized unit rotation smoothing far form the camera
-[Experimental] Ground height checks optimizations
-[Experimental] Locomotion velocity & animation speed calculation optimizations
-Unit static collision system optimizations
-Grass system optimizations
-Significant crowd animation system optimizations
-[Experimental] Distributed unit motion calculations over multiple frames to make the framerate smoother
-Optimized calculation of push forces in combat
-Reduced stutter after loading a savefile by moving the loading of the construction assets into the loading screen (in consequence making the loading screen a bit longer)
-Pathfinding optimizations
-Optimized memory usage

Crashfixes:
-Fixed a crash when the player deleted a squad by RMB during the rallying tool being active with that squad
-Fixed a crash when relocating a forager with a herbs garden while one of the workers has a task related to the garden and then reassigning the worker in the relocated building
-Fixed a crash for saves that had a bugged 0 yield field because the player placed such a narrow plot it couldn't be triangulated properly

Bugfixes:
-Fixed the deer not migrating back to their lair location if the camera is far due to optimization introduced in 0.7.975
-Coat of arms editor "field E" not displaying text properly
-Fixed saving erasing ownership data of items in the inventory, leading for instance to woodcutters transporting log pieces to the storehouse
-Fixed: Rounding up influence value shown in UI may give an impression that claiming territory is not working correctly
-Fixed: Placing a road over carts permanently remove them from game
-Fixed: Limiting Farmhouse's work area does not prevent workers from gathering already harvested crops from fields
-Fixed: After destroying the well, buildings do not lose water access
-Fix attempt for militia potentially not unequipping their military gear if they are disbanded while still inside their houses, leading to "animData not found" errors for civilian actions happening when dressed in military type body
-Fixed bloomers overrefueling their workplaces
-Fixed castle modules costing too many resources (To confirm whether it was already present in the public build)
-Fixed the extension/conversion sound signatures not applying the volume settings
-Added a temp workaround for snowflakes not displaying on AMD GPUs
-Fixed black shrubs occurring during a drought
-Fixed "snap to roads" checkbox not doing anything when placing plots
-Added a fix attempt for players being to place fields that are almost self intersecting, leading to them being unselectable and/or having 0% fertility
-Fixed "save game" and "load game" header texts getting mixed up in the load menu
-Fixed deer getting stuck if bandits are near
-Fixed deer getting scared of birds and running away, potentially forever (fun one)

Cosmetics:
-One handed combo animation polish and two handed idle pose polish
-[Experimental] Changed back the deposit icons to be all flat shaded for unification
-Made drought transitions smoother
-Added turning animations for oxen so that they appear less stiff when moving
-Spring color palette tweaks to overall appear less yellowish
-Main menu scene reworked for better historical authenticity
-Two handed combat animations cleanup (attack-defend-attack-defend combos)
-Further Field material art direction & specular variation
-More precise height calculation on landscape deforming meshes like mines

I have to be honest, this patch was tough, but I don't want to make excuses. I hope future ones will come quicker.

Thank you for your patience, support and playing the game! Please continue sharing your thoughts and feedback in a Steam review!

Greg Styczeń
Lead developer, Slavic Magic