Surviving the winter is probably the hardest thing you will have to do and prepare for during the first few in-game years of your Manor Lords playthrough. Winter’s cold itself can be lethal, but its effect on your production and well-being will be something to worry about. Here is how to survive winter in Manor Lords.
Manor Lords: How to survive winter
Surviving winter in Manor Lords will encompass more of a preemptive effort than a reactive one. In simple terms, your population will not freeze or starve to death as long as you focus on preparing your whole city for the coldest season of the year. This is because, as said above, food production and fuel consumption will severely change, with crops becoming impossible to grow and fuel consumption duplicating. That said, let’s look at what we can do to prevent our untimely freezing end.
Stockpile on Food and Fuel
Since crops won’t be available during winter, you will have all year to collect and amass huge amounts of resources. Assign your villagers to the crop fields, and wild hunt habitats, and craft backyard extensions to create an assortment of foods to keep your families fed, preventing disease from becoming an issue. Also, make use of Granaries and Woodcutter’s Lodges to both collect the surplus of resources for the winter and to create Firewood to provide Fuel, respectively.
You can also import food and fuel from the Trading Post, although it will become costly if you are not currently exporting any surplus of any material you might have. However, this will provide some resources and food you might not have access to at the time.
If Fuel becomes an issue, then you can unlock the Charcoal Burning development skill. This will unlock the Charcoal Kiln, which will transform Firewood into two pieces of Charcoal, doubling your Fuel reserves and, in practice, getting rid of the double fuel consumption issue when you only had Firewood at your disposal.
Forget about vegetation, it’s time to hunt
Crops and berries will become unavailable during the winter due to the conditions, meaning that any families assigned to Farming or Foraging will do nothing until winter passes. This change can go by inadvertently, so be sure to assign these families to other ventures, especially hunting wild animals to get their meat, which will become the main food source during the season. Once winter passes, be sure to assign them back to their original tasks, balancing things out and allowing you to gather more resources at once for the remainder of the year and next winter.
Don’t let any family without a home
Now, this is a very basic action you can take during the early stages of your playthrough: assign all your families to a specific household. Not only will you be getting rid of the homelessness warning that haunts my dreams, but this will allow your families to survive the dangerous conditions of the winter. Build as many Burgage Plots as necessary to ensure your families won’t freeze to death during the winter. Don’t worry, the families will find their way to their new home automatically.
Necessary measures
Finally, if you are suffering from a severe case of lack of resources and food during the midst of winter, then you can choose to activate the Strict Fasting policy. This will force all of your villagers to skip every fifth meal. This will reduce food consumption by 20% but will also decrease your Approval rating. See this as a last resort option since your Approval could get a severe hit if this is combined with other issues such as disease, housing, fuel availability, etcetera.
And those are some things you can do to prevent winter from becoming your doom. I would also suggest not overpopulation your town if you do not have the means to increase your food and fuel reserves. Start building your town little by little, and not even the harshest of winters will leave a scratch on you.