Manor Lords' lead developer might have left deer-related chaos in the game, but it's only because he's busy upgrading the hit city builder to a fancier engine.
Manor Lords is undoubtedly one of the year's biggest early access success stories, having sold over 2 million copies as of last month. Since the game is still actively in production, Manor Lords creator and kind-of-sole developer Greg Styczeń has been pushing out updates pretty consistently, but the latest one seems to have missed a bug that caused some in-game deer to not properly migrate. Deer idleness will continue for the foreseeable future, though, as Styczeń is turning his gaze away from deer migration and toward engine migration.
"Despite leaving in that deer migration bug in that latest build (sorry!) I decided to leave the current version up for longer and do the migration to Unreal Engine 5 now," Styczeń explains in a note to the Manor Lords Discord. "We are about halfway there, just a few things to iron out... But now since ML will be on UE5, the game has official engine support again and that includes the ability to simultaneously work on console ports without hitting blocks from obsolete console SDKs."
"Annoying engine things" like flickering roads and occasional crashes that stem from memory corruption have also apparently been fixed during the move to Unreal Engine 5.
On top of the move to Unreal Engine 5, the Manor Lords developer previously expressed a desire to retreat into his "dev cave" and "finally add some new features" to the game. What these new features could be is anyone's guess, but the much-requested bubonic plague is definitely off the table.
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