# Manor Lords New experimental BETA finally arrived (0.8.035 beta) - Product: Manor Lords (https://whatsnew.fyi/product/manor-lords) - Vendor: Slavic Magic - Date: 2025-10-02 - Original notes: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1363080/view/514096230384534362 - Permalink: https://whatsnew.fyi/product/manor-lords/releases/2025-10-02-new-experimental-beta-finally-arrived-0.8.035-bet What's New is an index, not a publisher: every entry below links to the vendor's own release notes, which are the authoritative source. Entries are labelled where they are hand-curated sample data, pre-releases, or drawn from a secondary source such as a developer blog. Reuse: the summaries, labels and curation here are © What's New. Quote freely with attribution and a link back; wholesale republication of the corpus is not permitted — terms: https://whatsnew.fyi/terms. The vendors' own release notes remain their publishers'. --- - **added** — Ability to preselect the starting location in the game setup screen - **added** — New playable maps: Devil's Hill, Jagged Cliffs, Divided, Large Lake - **added** — New game modes: Duel (1 vs 1 with AI) and Fractured Realm (4 Lord free-for-all) - **added** — New jobs and buildings: Quarry, Stonemason, Lime Kiln, with connected resources Rough Stone, Dressed Stone, Mortar - **added** — New system for positioning units on walls - **added** — Units now climb ladders to access higher floors - **added** — Ability to hover over castle fortifications to see soldiers inside - **added** — Ability to open and close each castle gate individually - **added** — Ability to upgrade every castle module, including walls and gates, to level 2 - **added** — Ability to attach platforms to castle walls with level capped by wall type - **added** — Environment Affinity system dividing regions into Meadow, Woodland, Farmland, Urban, and Rural areas with building affinities affecting efficiency - **added** — Maintenance system for workplaces with failure risks such as mine collapses - **added** — Records and graphs for monitoring production and consumption data and worker time allocation - **changed** — Castle module placement is no longer restricted by distance to nearest major module - **changed** — Bailey area allowed for construction is now limited by lord or lady rank - **changed** — Maintenance rates can be tuned to affect labor speed - **changed** — Resources split into more granular categories: vegetables became Cabbages, Carrots, Beetroots with individual pros and cons - **changed** — Residential requirements recoded to allow players to utilize different resource combinations to satisfy townsfolk - **changed** — Progression system redesigned to feel more thematic with less obvious choices - **changed** — AI controlled players and AI towns improved with more natural and organic town appearance - **removed** — Older saves no longer compatible with this version Hello everyone, Sorry for taking so long this time. I am rethinking what went wrong to ensure it won’t happen again. I focused on expanding the developer team and tackled way too many issues at once. Right now, on the left of my screen in the engine window, is a graveyard full of perks that didn’t work out and were all eventually discarded. I needed to align visions with the new designers, and the new programmers learning the codebase (that was basically a giant solo dev spaghetti) also led to a bunch of problems. There were also some major refactors done that will be (hopefully) completely invisible, but without them, the AI towns could not function properly (basically, how data is organized internally). Some tasks appeared innocent but ended up being huge rabbit holes. From now on, the goal is to focus on smaller-sized updates but uploading more frequently, starting with bugfix and polish, and the rest of the Development Perks (in the beta, you’ll find the first 9 perks). But, some of the things I think we eventually accomplished that you can try in the Beta: - Good progress on AI controlled players and AI towns. AI can’t challenge the player yet but it’s getting close, its towns look relatively natural and organic which is a major goal for us. - The new progression system should now feel thematic, and the choices should be less boring and obvious. - A lot more depth overall. There’s maintenance, efficiency, yield, productivity, dynamic population growth rates, various approval effects, environment affinities, and most of these things work based on modifiers that can be stacked together for ultimate results. We also added records and graphs for the player to be able to peek into the production and consumption data, worker time allocation to properly optimize their towns. - There are many other significant changes though they will all feel “work in progressy”, like the ability to upgrade to a stone castle, place your soldiers on walls and peek inside the towers. We broke up the resources in a more granular way so veggies became Cabbages, Carrots, Beetroots and so on, all with their own pros and cons, and residential requirements were recoded so that the players can utilize all those new resources in different combinations to satisfy the townsfolk. - Oh, and there are new maps to play on that I think you can find quite cool, like the one with a giant lake and others that have a lot of cool rocky cliff spots. Ps. Due to how major the changes were, older saves will no longer work! Here are the full patch notes so far, and as usual, let me know what you think on our Discord. Thank you, and again apologies for taking so long. Greg – lead dev ##### How to Access the Beta --- **Saves:** To avoid any potential issues, it’s recommended that you back up your saved files before switching to a beta version. **Mods:** Please remove any mods. They will most likely crash the game. > **To find your Manor Lords Steam saves.** - Press Win + E - Go to %USERPROFILE%]]AppDataLocalManorLordsSavedSaveGames into the search bar. **To try the BETA, 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 > You can report (https://steamcommunity.com/app/1363080/discussions/3/) and [bug reports](https://steamcommunity.com/app/1363080/discussions/2/) on the Manor Lords Steam forums or join us on (https://discord.com/invite/manorlords) for bug reports and discussion about the latest patch. --- ##### Patch Notes — Version 0.8.029–0.8.035 (Beta) ##### Major Changes - **Starting Location Selection:** Ability to preselect the starting location in the game setup screen. - **New Maps:** New playable maps: Devil's Hill, Jagged Cliffs, Divid _[Truncated at 4000 characters — full notes: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1363080/view/514096230384534362]_