Key Updates in 0.8.004

Unreal Engine 5

• The game has been successfully upgraded to Unreal Engine 5, addressing multiple stability and performance issues, including random crashes during loading screens and resolution changes.
• Improved visuals with new volumetric clouds, a virtual shadow map system for sharper shadows, and enhanced performance through GPU-based LOD handling for instanced components.

New Gameplay Features

• Fishing System: Fishing ponds may now spawn on the map with a new resource node, Shoal of Fish. Fishermen can now fish at the Fisherman’s Hut, and fish multiply during spring months. Be careful of overfishing as ponds freeze in winter, and a new Winter Fishing branch can be unlocked to extend fishing year-round.
• Butchers & Food Spoilage: Butchers can now turn surplus livestock into meat, and a new spoilage system has been introduced. Foods like fish spoil faster than bread, and new Salt Deposits can be used to make sausages to reduce spoilage.
• Crossbows & Huntsmen Mercenaries: Crossbows can now be crafted at the Bowyer’s Workshop and equipped by militia and The Huntsmen, a new ranged mercenary unit.

• Production Limits & Reserves: Set production limits for different workplaces and reserves for prioritizing specific resources, such as shields or bows.

Performance & Optimizations

• Significant CPU optimizations for late-game scenarios, making large cities run smoother.
• Reduced stutter and improved load times for large save files.
• Multiple optimizations for crowd animations, pathfinding, unit rotations, and rendering of surface checks to further improve performance.

Balance Changes & Bug Fixes

• Advanced Pondkeeping was introduced to increase pond capacity and limit overfishing.
• Various balance adjustments to resource node spawning, deposit management, and food spoilage rates.
• Fixed several crashes and bugs, including deer behavior issues, villagers ignoring storage filters, and certain game-breaking edge cases related to saved games and building placement.

To the Manor Lords Community:

Manor Lords Patch Notes - Version 0.8.004

• 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.
• [Experimental] A new "virtual shadow map" system that produces very sharp, high resolution shadows.
• New volumetric clouds and atmosphere rendering.
• GPU based LOD for Instanced Components.
• I tried my best to match UE5 settings (foliage LODs, fog level) to UE4's settings since some players perceived a downgrade.

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

• Each food type decays at a certain rate per month, for instance, fish decay faster than bread.
• Certain buildings affect spoilage, for instance storing in a granary is better than storing in the workplace's pantry.
• Weather events can affect spoilage rates (droughts make food spoil quicker).
• Added drought impact to the spoilage tooltip.
• Added a "spoilage multiplier" difficulty setting to the game setup.

• Added a new resource node: Fishing pond.
• Made so that the ponds freeze in the winter.
• Added a new development branch, Advanced Pondkeeping, that enables fishing all year round and doubles the capacity.
• Added a new food resource: Fish.
• Added a new workplace: Fisherman's hut, with new job (fisherman).
• Fish pond water level should lower during droughts.

• Added a new military resource: Crossbows (made in bowyer workshop).
• Added new unit types: Light Mercenary Crossbowmen and Militia Crossbowmen.
• Added a new ranged low tier mercenary group: "The huntsmen".
• Iron Parts are required to make Crossbows. They are made from Iron Slabs by the Blacksmith Artisan.

• Implemented the butcher artisan conversion. Butchers take surplus sheep and lamb and convert them into meat.
• Added new deposit (salt) and readded the salt resource which is mined with the surface/deep mine.
• 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.
• 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.
• Advanced Skinning development branch doubles the Meat from butchers as well.
• 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.

• You now have to choose what animal to order, either a pig or a goat.
• Pigs give 2x meat every 150 days, Goats give 1 meat + 1 hides every 150 days.
• Added pig sound effects.

Gameplay & Balance

• 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.
• Added generic storage to the Malthouse since it stores fuel.
• 1 Malt now makes 2 Ale.

• When bought, sheep all have pregnancy counter set to 0 for better predictability of the sheep breeding development branch.
• A minimum of 2 sheep are now required for breeding to occur.
• Sheep pregnancy duration lowered to 145 days (+-1) (Variable is currently hidden in the game).
• The number of lambs born per region cap increased to a maximum of 2 every ten days.

• The bonus resource node was removed since most people thought that it's a bug.
• Since most people expect between 2-3 ponds and 2-3 salt deposits per map, instead of spawning them as a bonus node from a random pool, fishing ponds can now randomly replace berry deposits, and salt deposits can randomly replace iron deposits. Once again, the randomization uses a fixed pool to spawn 2-3 of those per map, as the players seem to expect.

Minor Changes

• Rewrote the random node algorithm to reduce cases where it fails to find an appropriate spot and spawns an object in the 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.
• 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.
• Enhanced the tooltip for the "NA" price to explain better why it's not available.
• "Fuel reserve" renamed to "fuel stockpile" not to confuse with the new "reserve" options.
• Removed the "max capacity" placeholder text.
• Added max mining deposit capacity to save data.
• If an animal breeding fails due to collision, another attempt will be made next cycle.
• Adjusted stone gate spawning locations for specific lv3 plots (left side anchored, no expansion upgrade).
• Added new help buttons to reserve and production limit and added entries for text in barter UI and work area and road curvature.
• Changed the season tooltip to display the current year instead of years survived, as well as the day of the month.
• Changed the Animal Pen upgrade icon to reflect the new animal choices.
• Traders will continue working when sick until they reach home region again.
• Changed ox plowing directions to be even more historically accurate (from center, outside).
• [Experimental] The game hides the demolish button on the very last Hitching Post in the region in order to protect new players from game overing themselves by deleting the last hitching post and making the ox run away. I made the stables follow the same rules, so that if you have 10 stables and 1 hitching post, you may delete the hitching post, but if you have 1 stable, you can no longer delete it.
• Adjusted the description of the "Better deals" perk.
• Added the livestock order timer to save data.

Optimizations

• 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 from 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.
• [Experimental] Dynamic foliage LODs: Tree detail will now vary on the camera angle additionally to being dependent on the distance to the camera.

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.
• Fixed a crash when deer were startled off-map.
• Fixed a crash when the baron loots one of the bandit camps.
• Fixed the game crashing when Baron clears a bandit camp.
• Fixed the crash when booting the game while volumetric clouds setting is off in the ini file.
• Fixed a crash when drawing over 200 waypoints for a squad.

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 over refueling 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 able 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).
• Fixed deer not being startled by buildings.
• Fixed: Villagers can fetch water from the not fully constructed well.
• Fixed: Windmill does not respect the Production Limit.
• Fixed the tavern production limit being visible even though it doesn't produce anything.
• Fixed invalid push force scaling at high framerates, resulting in units pushing themselves away indefinitely in rare situations.
• Fixed some parts of the lv3 residential stone gate wall floating or spawning with gaps.
• Fixed lv3 stone gate not always being spawned deterministically when a plot is narrow and there is no expansion, leading to some buildings appearing as unconstructed after loading a save.
• Fixed villagers & oxen sometimes not respecting storage filters.
• Fixed "berry" regional strength sometimes being picked even though there is no berries spawned cause a pond replaced them.
• Fixed the heads sometimes disappearing when a newly spawned villager exits a building.
• Fixed soldiers running away from the enemy immediately after loading a save (cowards).
• Fixed deer counting as 2 when breeding.
• Fixed setting highlights disappearing after changing the language.
• Fixed storehouse workers collecting fuel stockpiles from buildings that need to be refueled.
• Fixed the "Rooftiles" icon being greyed.
• Fixed the "constantly pause and unpause the game to stop days passing" exploit.
• Fixed deer icon not moving to their lair location after reloading the game.
• Fixed lamb age not loading properly.
• Fixed Herders not collecting Wool from Sheep if the sheep move after the task is created and not move again due to the camera being far.
• Fixed: Barter traders leave imported non-food goods in market stalls.
• Fixed: Reserve set in the Tavern for Ale distribution is not being respected.
• Removed the extra 2 days between December and January which resulted from the day of the year counter starting at 0.
• Fixed: Military equipment crafted by Artisans is not being transported to the Storehouse if the corresponding Workshop's Storage is full.
• Fixed oxen not reaccommodating to another hitching post or stable if their current "home" hitching post gets demolished.
• Fixed grass not disappearing after deleting and rebuilding a vegetable garden.
• Fixed: Incorrect animal gets delivered if save/load is performed after ordering one (for example traders importing chickens by mistake) (Note: This fix may only work on a new save).
• Fixed the fuel reservation bug sometimes getting fuel into the negatives.
• Fixed building access limit triggering too aggressively, resulting in a workers "waiting" cause they think too many people are trying to access the same building at the same time.
• Fixed villagers taking away Charcoal from workplaces that have fuel stockpiles.
• Fixed: Trapping perk does not work until loading a save file.
• Fixed: Workers keep producing goods without respecting the set reserve if it is set to 1000 or more.
• Fixed: Bloomery not respecting crafting reserve.
• Fixed: Trading post workers do not sell goods after loading a save.
• Fixed: Production in the Hunting camp blocks when the Generic storage is full of Carcass.
• Fixed: "Lazy buildings" (Like the sitting log in the hunting camp) being treated as workbenches.
• Fixed deer carcasses sometimes not disappearing from the rack after crafting is finished if a game was loaded during the crafting process.
• Fixed the meat lying under the table in the hunting camp.
• Fixed hunters sometimes bringing over 2 carcasses for skinning in the hunting camp even though there are only 2 skinning racks.
• Fixed resources retrieved from the bandit camp being able to land in a pond, leading to the bandits possibly trying to loot them, not being able to get into the pond to get them and clog pathfinding, resulting in pathfinding for squads not working or being laggy.
• Fixed Tavernkeepers transporting Ale back to the Granary if it exceeds 85% of the Pantry limit.
• Second fix attempt: Resources retrieved from the bandit camp being able to land in a pond.
• Fixed export price showing as "NA" in the trading post when doing local trade only (foreign trade checkbox disabled).
• Fixed villagers not unequipping carts when going to fetch water.
• Fixed villagers clumping too much at the well (note: this might affect transportation limits of other buildings again, aka more workers waiting if too many people want to access the same building at the same time).
• Fixed grass not properly culling over fields.

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.
• Tried to tune the ice material to make it less like, according to one player, concrete :)
• [Experimental] Pond material changes: The water edge is softened at the cost of AA motion precision (sadly, we can't have both). Pond water now receives shadows. Note: Shadows will look pixelated up close with "sharp" shadow settings - Epic is working on a solution as we speak.
• Increased the distance of cartwheels/barrels rotating which was earlier reduced too aggressively for optimization.
• Increased how quickly the weather changes to reduce the periods of overcast weather since some players reported that the game is too gloomy.
• The irregularity of the vegetable field shape now scales with their size. This way they are no longer too wobbly as they get very large.
• [Experimental] Light function atlas enabled to allow ponds to receive cloud shadows - cloud shadow material edits were required.
• Tweaked grass LODs & Grass Wind.