How to get food in Manor Lords and stock up for winter

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Key Manor Lords food items include meat, vegetables, berries, and bread

How to get Manor Lords food
(Image credit: Hooded Horse)

Growing and stockpiling Manor Lords food is obviously crucial if you want your town to survive and expand, and there are so many different ways to go about it. From hunting animals for meat and foraging for berries, to full-on agriculture with vegetable plots, chicken eggs, and flour for bread. Ensuring you've got sufficient food, and even Manor Lords fuel, will you boost your Approval and help you survive the hardships of winter too. If you need some tips on how to get food in Manor Lords, I've explained the basics of foraging, hunting, and gardening to keep townsfolk fed below. 

I've also got some more general tips and tricks for Manor Lords to help with all the other early issues you might hit.

How to get food in Manor Lords

Manor lords food production

(Image credit: Hooded Horse)

Your main food sources in Manor Lords are meat, berries, backyard extension goods like eggs or vegetables, and bread. For the best start you want to find an animal habitat and berry deposit on your map and, in the Gathering menu, choose the Hunting Camp for the animals and Forager's Hut for the berries. You'll then need to assign at least one person to each to actively gather each food type.  

The default Manor Lords scenario settings should start the game during Spring, meaning berries will be plentiful initially but be aware that this resource dwindles to nothing during winter. Be sure, as well, to adjust the population limit at the Hunting Camp to ensure you don't hunt animals to extinction. Vegetables are another important Manor Lords food source. Any level 1 Burgage plot with a large enough backyard can add a vegetable garden as an extension, or a chicken coop to grant a passive yield of eggs. 

Hunting, foraging and burgage farming will give you a diverse diet and surplus food, so make sure you build the appropriate storage buildings and assign people to run them. This will build up your food reserves for tougher times and, if there's plenty to go around, that means a higher approval rating and a better chance of newcomers being attracted to join your settlement.

Bread is also a very valuable resource but will take a few extra steps. The pay off, however, is that a single wheat harvest is enough to set you up for the rest of the year. To make bread in Manor Lords you need to first grow and harvest wheat in one of a fields by assigning a few people to a Farmhouse. Then, build a Windmill in a distant clearing for good wind, that still has decent road access, and assign one of your idle Manor Lords people there to refine the wheat into flour. The last step is to build a Communal Oven and assign someone else to bake the flour into bread.

If you've been building enough Manor Lords regional wealth to set up Trade Routes in Manor Lords you can also set up routes for things like bread, grain, meat etc and then set the options to 'import' only. You'll use up your cash buying food in but it can get you through tough patches.

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Jasmine Gould-Wilson
Jasmine Gould-Wilson
Senior Staff Writer, GamesRadar+

Jasmine is a Senior Staff Writer at GamesRadar+. Raised in Hong Kong and having graduated with an English Literature degree from Queen Mary, University of London, she began her journalism career as a freelancer with TheGamer and Tech Radar Gaming before joining GR+ full-time in 2023. She now focuses predominantly on features content for GamesRadar+, attending game previews, and key international conferences such as Gamescom and Digital Dragons in between regular interviews, opinion pieces, and the occasional stint with the news or guides teams. In her spare time, you'll likely find Jasmine challenging her friends to a Resident Evil 2 speedrun, purchasing another book she's unlikely to read, or complaining about the weather.

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