Manor Lords packs many systems to ensure your town’s steady growth. Besides increasing your approval rating, there’s a technology development tree with various points focusing on improvement. You’ll unlock these development points as you progress and upgrade your village. However, like most other games, unlocking some development points is better than others. To help you avoid that exact confusion, keep reading as I tell you about the best development points to get in Manor Lords.
Note: While I have suggested eight development points, you can only unlock a total of six points in early-access. Also note that you cannot reset the points once selected. I suggest going through the list below wisely and focusing on the wants you want. You have been warned.
1. Trapping
Trapping is one of the best development points you can unlock in Manor Lords. Chances are, your assigned tiles will have animals. That will contribute to the early-game food and later pelts for leather. As such, unlocking trapping gives your settlement passive income of meat alongside pelts. This is good since your settlement won’t go hungry early on.
2. Advanced Skinning
Remember how previously I talked about unlocking trapping for meat production? Well, you can further improve your meat production by unlocking advanced skinning. This doubles the amount of meat hunters harvest. This naturally helps cope with the increased hunger demand by villagers and is, hence, very useful.
3. Forest Management
Chances are that your map region will have a berry deposit. This is exactly why Forest Management is one of the best early development points you should unlock in Manor Lords.
If you build a Forager and assign a family to it, you’ll get some easy food surplus up until winter. This development point doubles the berry capacity on the map. This results in increased output on food, and if you have more than needed, you can trade and make money to upgrade.
4. Heavy Plow
Farming is a core system in Manor Lords. After you hit mid-game, you’d want a prosperous farm that can efficiently prepare the field and transfer the materials to a shed. Hence, we suggest picking Heavy Plow skills to make your farming efficient.
This skill improves the plowing speed and helps store grains safely after a harvest. This results in more yield through seasons and, well, more profit.
5. Charcoal Burning
Villagers in Manor Lords need three things to survive – food variety, wood to keep their house warm, and some entertainment alongside a Church. You can run into a firewood crisis later in-game, especially during the winter.
To nip that in the bud, you can unlock the Charcoal Burning development point. True to its name, this point converts one firewood into two charcoals. This doubles the warmth needs of your villagers, and also for furnaces.
6. Trade Logistics
Trading is an important aspect of Manor Lords if you want to make money to upgrade your overall village. It involves setting trade routes and costing varying degrees of regional wealth. Trade Logistics helps eliminate that problem, capping the regional wealth requirement to a maximum of 25.
So, you don’t have to worry about paying a lot of money to set up a trade route, deservedly earning a place in our best development points list for Manor Lords.
7. Better Deals
If you’ve already unlocked the development point above, the Better Deals skill is the next one you should get right after. This handy point decreases the foreign trade import prices by 10, making imports cheaper. So if you are running out of Barley, you can import it into your village by paying cheaper per Barley.
8. Deep Mining
The last development point on our list is situational, but a good one if you have natural deposits like clay and iron on your map. Since these are finite resources, unlocking deep mining allows you infinite access to these deposits.
These are the best development points you should unlock to improve your Manor Lords experience. Rest assured that we will update this article as the game nears its 1.0 release. So, which development points did you end up getting? Let us know in the comments below!
