Development News (Info on the Upcoming Update)

Hi everyone!

Tim here, CEO of Manor Lords publisher Hooded Horse. I'm checking in to bring some news of the upcoming update. My apologies for being a bit late with this news post -- so my plan is to check in here once a month, unless there's a new update released or about to be released to either beta or main. And we've been in a bit of a holding pattern here, because the latest update has been in a cycle of QA testing, us thinking the build is just about ready for beta testing release to all of you, and then discovering some problems requiring fixes, for a couple weeks (we always test the new builds including with a professional QA firm before they go out to public beta testing, to try to fix as many bugs as possible, though of course they never find quite as much as beta playtesting reveals).

So I made the bad judgement call of thinking, oh it's a few days away, I'll just wait for the update, a few times over, as we kept finding stuff to fix. My apologies for that, I should have just dropped in a news post instead regardless of what I expected to happen, and checked in with all of you.

And that's what I'm doing here -- the update itself is likely very soon, so I hope no one minds the multiple messages in rapid succession, but I didn't want to take any chance of not getting something to you now. Going forward I'm going to assume the unexpected and just leave a post here once we get to that time, unless the update has already just occurred or is being prepared right then, to ensure I don't repeat my mistake and we get news to you regardless. With that out of the way, we've got some detailed reports from the dev team below.

Note this update is very technically focused on improving how the game functions under the hood, with pathfinding a major focus:

Pathfinding Refactor

We decided to revisit pathfinding due to mounting technical and gameplay concerns. On the AI side, inefficiencies in how distances were being calculated started to impact performance while collision and navigation issues were undermining the reliability of core systems like worker behavior and unit movement.

Rather than continuing to stack fixes on top of fixes as we had been doing, we made the call to step back and address the root of the problem. That meant reworking how units evaluate space, navigate around obstacles, and recover when something goes wrong.

It also meant taking a hard look at systems that had quietly degraded over time. In some cases, behavior that once worked well had become unreliable through iteration, and needed to be rebuilt to match the current state of the game.

While this was a detour from the main plan of development, it affects every facet of the game going forward and we feel the result has been worth it. As you’ll see later after the update's release from the patch notes, there’s a considerable amount of fixes for cases where characters or animals became stuck, blocked entrances or failed to move, especially in and around castles or tight spaces. Merchants are more reliable, Oxen move more smoothly when plowing, troop movement on roads is more natural, and so on.

And second, we do have some news where all of your feedback influenced the development plans:

What about the “Trade Rework”?

In our January blog post, we talked about one of the Trade Rework concepts we’d been