Since the launch of the game on Steam, GOG, and Epic Store, the game has been enjoyed by thousands of you! It in an incredible journey for us to see so many of our players enjoy the game and fall in love with it! We received a "Very Positive" rating on Steam, hundred of people joined our Discord community, shared screenshots of their amazing settlement, asked questions, feedback and helped us identify bugs and balance issues with the game. This is no less true also for our Steam forums, where you are passionately discussing the game, sharing suggestions, and your feedback. Many also made Youtube videos, spread the word about the game to their friends, or even made some useful guides for others!

We are incredibly humbled by the response of the community and the support and help we have received. Thank you to everyone who participated, even if simply by purchasing the game! Your support motivates us to do our best, brings a smile to our face almost every day, and most importantly - helps us make the best game we can. And if we may ask, please keep it coming. Write a review on Steam, join our Discord, send us your feedback, interact with the community - launching in early access was just a start and we want to keep it lively and interesting.

Livestreams with Developers

If you've missed our launch day live streams, you can watch the Interview with the Developers with DaBesJared and our presentation about the history of the development.

If you want to be there live and ask questions, we will be hosting another live stream this Saturday 23rd at 7PM CEST (1PM EST, 10 AM PST) on our Twitch channel. We hope to see you all there and will be happy to answer all your questions!

F.A.Q.

Speaking of questions, we received many of them and decided to maintain a #faq channel on our Discord together with a collection of suggested features so our community know we are taking your feedback on board. While we can't make any promises about what will end up in the game in the end beyond our public roadmap we still want you to know we monitor the feedback and do our best to find some extra time to implement the most impactful features.

Once again thank you all for participating in our community and making it such a nice and supportive place. And thank you for being patient with our updates and issues the game currently has as we work on fixing them.

And now without further ado, here is a list of questions and answers, followed by the suggested features list.

Q: Why are villagers not building?
A: First thing to check is if there is a zone over the area and this zone is assigned to a family that is supposed to be building. Then we recommend checking if the family has access to resources in any of their zones. If you are counting on them buying resources from the warehouse, make sure the warehouse has a storefront built. Manor and Warehouse will be assigned to the ruling family automatically and structures inside will be built by them. Structures outside of any zoned area will be also built by the ruling family at this moment.

Q: Why are villagers not working?
A: When it comes to work, villagers need to have all the structures that are required by the zone, to perform work. Which resources are needed for their job you can observe in the tooltip of each of the required structures (see the recipes of the structure). Often firewood is easily forgotten! You also need to make sure that the work structures do not have all access points blocked - trees and corpses block the access as well! You can also check the priority settings of the zone to see if some of the resource priority is 0. If none of this helps, we may have a bug and we would encourage you to report it so we can make sure it gets fixed!

Q: Why are people not buying / selling their resources?
A: Villagers are only buying things they have a practical need for. Building materials will be purchased only if they have blueprints to build, other resources will be purchased only if they are required to perform their work. They also need to have enough money to be able to purchase things so make sure some villagers are not keeping all the gold in the economy and redistribute wealth if needed. On the other hand, villagers will be selling only resources they do not need for themselves or that they do not have to pay taxes on. They progressively put taxed resources aside and will not sell them to other villagers unless they run out of money to purchase food.

Q: How exactly do villagers manage the storefronts?
A: Villagers collect all the resources they want to sell every morning and put it up in an empty storefront (private store in their zone if there is one or one in the closest marketplace otherwise). Storefronts have fixed opening hours that last from 9 AM to 3 PM so you need to make sure the storages are managed well and in proximity to the storefront so it does not take them too long to put all the goods up for sale. Finally, ground storages are considered too heavy to carry for the store, so instead, villagers will sell "contracts" that grant the buyer permission to pick them up directly from the storage.

Q: Small families do not work well?
A: Unfortunately at this moment, very small families are unable to function very well as each day requires occupying a storefront, performing labor, and cooking meals for the family, which a single person can't manage to do alone.

Q: Can I expel a family?
A: Not at this moment, but in future updates, you will be able to force people to join the monastery, recruit them to the army, execute them for their crimes, or exile them from the settlement.

Q: Is there a penalty for seizing?
A: Not at this moment. In our first update, we will be adding a reputation system, which will be impacted by frequent seizing actions. Our idea is that players should always strive to optimize their taxation strategy and use seizing as a last resort option.

Q: How are granted and seized resources transferred?
A: The moment a resource is granted or seized, the new owner will soon collect them from their storage and store them in their own zone (or drop them inside of their zone as a trashpile if there are not enough storages available). This means it takes a while before you will see the granted resources in the inventory of the new family.

Q: When should I grant and when should I sell?
A: Granting is useful when you want to be specific. Say you want a family of fishers to collect exactly 50 yarn. They could purchase them from you, but they will only do this when they actually need them, and they will have to be there before any other family will need yarn and purchase it first.

Q: Can I purchase resources from villagers?
A: At this moment we do not have a UI that would support this action. You can only seize resources and grant them gold in the granting tab afterward.

Q: Why are villagers selling the resources they need?
A: You may wonder why a farmer is selling cooking ingredients when they will end up starving themselves if they can't harvest more. Or why fishermen are selling yarn when it is clear they will need it to repair their fishing net eventually anyway. The reason is that in our design we put the sustainability of the settlement as a whole first. If we would make villagers too selfish and overprotective of their goods, the economy would slow down and it would be more difficult to run smoothly. Villagers thus keep stock only for the next few days and everything else they offer on sale in case anyone has a more immediate need for it. This puts a lot more emphasis on the player to choose wisely if they are ready to accept a new family since villagers will not hesitate to sell them their goods and might put themselves into a tougher situation.

Q: What is the purpose of money in the game and can I get more of it?
A: Money facilitates the trade and wealth of every family. Everything has a market price which is maintained over time by monitoring supply and demand for each resource. Certain families thus grow wealthier and players can apply different taxing strategies based on their income. It is typical (and by design) that especially in the early game foragers will have an easy time making a lot of money if the player does not impose strong taxes, since everyone needs planks and wood to set up the settlement, while later money shifts more towards other families. Players thus need to redistribute wealth so that no family runs out of money to trade with and gets stuck in the economy. In the first big update, we are also adding a traveling salesman, which will introduce a new source of gold and thus allow to grow the gold in circulation over time (though they will also take gold away as they are selling resources to the villagers so you will need to make sure that does not happen too often).

Q: I started the game without a spouse. Can my family get one in the game?
A: Unfortunately not at this moment. We will be adding relationships in the World Update and in the noblemen update players will be able to arrange marriages with other noble families.

Q: Is there any use for beer / armor / weapons / rope / tools etc. at this moment?
A: Some resources currently have no use in the game. We call them the end of the production chain - the final form of products that typically take shape of equipment or consumables. For all of them, we plan to add useful content later. Equipment will become relevant for hunters and soldiers, tools will be used by villagers to improve the speed of their work and rope will find its use in building materials. With the addition of traveling salesmen next update, all resources can be a useful form of an export good which players will need to maintain tradeable gold in their economy.

Q: What if I don't meet royal demands?
A: The relationship with the royalty will suffer each year if the tax delivery is not sufficient. When it goes down completely, the player will be stripped off their titles and lose the map.

Q: How do I make cheese?
A: At this moment, there is a bug where we missed adding the recipe for cheese. so it does not show on the kitchen table. To make cheese, the family needs a kitchen table and cooked milk, which can be cooked in the cauldron with milk and firewood.

Q: Why do villagers wall themselves off?
A: Our AI has its quirks and in this case, they simply can't detect this is happening before it happens. Developing a good AI takes a lot of time and we continuously strive on improving it. Situations like these will be hopefully prevented in the future.

Q: Why are butchers not butchering animals?
A: Animals are only sold to the butchers when they get old enough to not be useful anymore. This means that cows, pigs, and chicken will have to reach nearly their maximum age (in our game it is around 3 to 5 ingame years depending on the animal). Since pigs do not produce additional goods, villagers sell them to the butchers as soon as they reach adulthood in one year of age.

Q: What do animals eat?
A: All animals eat straw, grain, rice grain, cabbage, carrot, potato, parsnip, melon, apples, and pears, and pigs also eat acorns. Villagers should be refilling the feeder as it is getting empty and they can mix those resources to refill it.

Q: Do new families arrive with money?
A: Yes, all new families carry some amount of gold with them. However, you will need to give them a household and build a chest so they can drop their gold in there and you will be able to see it. Our AI is using the chest to share the money with each other efficiently without having to chase each other. There is currently a confusing issue where we do not display this gold in the family inventory until it is stored in the chest and it appears as if they arrived with no money. We will be addressing this in the future.

Q: Where can I find save files and player logs?
A: Player logs are located in C:\Users\[USER]\AppData\LocalLow\Honestly Games\Lords and Villeins\. Here you can find the Player.log file as well as the SaveData folder containing all your save files.

Q: Linux / Mac / Mobile support?
A: At this moment, we have no specific plans to support these platforms. We would like to add support for Linux or Mac at some point but as a small team, we currently need to fully focus on Early Access on Windows.

Q: When is the new big update?
A: Soon! 😱 🎃 👻

Here is a small teaser! (click for bigger image)

Requested Features

These features we have noticed our community request more often. They are listed in no particular order. If you want to stay up to date with our list, seek our #requested-features channel on our Discord.

• Ability to modify terrain
• Customize starting conditions, including bigger maps
• More information about market prices, graphs, and historical data
• Zone templates and / or villagers planning houses by themselves
• Make designating storages to resources more easily
• Generate resources when salvaging trees and rocks
• Ability to selectively prioritize building blueprints
• Highlight blueprints that are missing resources
• Better information when resources are sold out, which were sold out
• A game mode where there is no royal tax
• Servants that work on the manor so the ruling family does not have to do the building
• More walls, floors, and roofs from other materials
• Ability to split households / families
• Tooltips sharing more detailed information about crops and animals
• All villagers can be gatherers - gather mushrooms, fruits, herbs, or cut down trees for wood
• Customize opening hours for storefronts
• More keybinds and the ability to customize them
• Ability to purchase resources from the villagers
• Add a structure that marks a mining spot for smelters to mine clay and for miners to mine underground
• New menu for removal tools, including a tool to remove vegetation only, or tools that apply on all layers
• Ability to move objects that have been built
• Make benches walkable and accessible from a side
• List which ground resources are sold in the storefront panel
• Ability to postpone the request to join UI
• Improve AI so that they can stock on resources for multiple tasks in a row
• Improve AI to manage their storages more efficiently and "group up" resources in them
• Improve AI so they do not plant crops that will not be able to finish
• Improve AI so they do not wall themselves off
• Rectangle size tooltip when placing zones
• Toggle visibility of blueprints
• Allow splitting families
• Block / limit production of certain resources, improve the priority UI

This article is featuring screenshots from our Discord member Snowy.