Military and Criminality update has arrived to Lords & Villeins!
Behold, Lords and Ladies,
The Military and Criminality update is here! Watch the trailer below to find out what's new!
Lords & Villeins will also be a part of Steam Summer Sale that starts June 23 (7PM CEST). You are now able to get the game at 20% off! The sale ends on June 7.
Important notice
Due to major refactoring of data structures, that aims to decrease the save file size and optimize loading times, we were unable to secure a backwards compatibility. As a result, your save files from previous versions will fail to load. We do our best to avoid this scenario as much as we can, but in this case we would simply not be able to continue our efforts in optimizations without it. We apologize for this complication and thank you all for your support and understanding!
We have also added a support for Steam cloud saves and relocated save files to a unique folder generated for each active Steam account. If there is more than one account playing on your machine, please be mindful that the first account that launches the game, will "claim" all existing save files and they will be automatically moved to their respective folder. When different steam users log on the same computer, they will not see the save files of the other account. Sharing is still possible by manually placing the save file in a different folder. Save files can be located at: C:\Users\[USER]\AppData\LocalLow\Honestly Games\Lords and Villeins\SaveData\.
How to access older version to be able to play your old save file
To give you an opportunity to continue playing your older save files and switch to the new version at your own pace, we have created a beta branch, where you can continue to access the pre-launch build. Due to the changes for Steam cloud, your save files will be copied to a new location once you launch the game after the update and the older version of the game will not be able to see them. In order to access them, these are the steps you can follow:
Right-click on Lords and Villeins in your Steam library and select Properties - Beta Version
Select the "oldversion" Beta branch
Navigate to save date folder C:\Users\[USER]\AppData\LocalLow\Honestly Games\Lords and Villeins\SaveData\
If any of your save files were copied to a subfolder within the SaveData folder (usually a folder with series of numbers), make sure you copy these save files back to the root of the SaveData folder.
The changelog does not list smaller bugfixes and UI improvements (we had to cut it somewhere! 😅) so be prepared for some delightful discoveries! Jump in the game right now and find out all that has changed!
With this update, we are slowly approaching the end of early access. We have only one major update ahead of us, before we start focusing on the final polish, bugfixes, localization and optimizations for the final release, so stick around for more news of what is next! Thank you for your support, big thanks to our numerous beta testers who contributed tremendously with their feedback and last but not least our players, who continue to enjoy our game and share their delight with the community!
And as always, you are welcome to join us on our Discord, and share your feedback in many of the places we follow - here in the comments, on Steam forums or on Reddit! For some occasional teasers and small news, make sure to follow us on Twitter too!
New Organization Type: Demesne
Demesne consists of the ruling family, the servant groups and military regiments.
Players can manage military regiments in the demesne tab of the villager book.
New regiments can be created or removed. Regiment types support the daily guard, night guards nad soldiers.
Ruling family can now own animals and seize, grant, sell or buy them on market.
New animal Horse added, as well as Stables zone managed by servants, where they can be prioritized together with other player-owned animals.
Villagers can now ride horses. Nobles ride them for fun, and soldiers to train for war.
New horse-riding skill added.
New Designation: Servant
Player can enlist peasants to join demesne as servants. They can be assigned to different work groups and perform duties for the player ruling family.
Servants will perform different tasks based on their assignment. Cooks can cook for the military and ruling family, stablehands take care of animals (mainly horses), laborers haul resources and deal with basic construction tasks.
New Servant Zones: Cottage, Stables and Kitchen utilized by servants to provide housing, cooking facilities and space for animal husbandry.
New Designation: Military
Special regiments in the Demesne tab determine duties of all assigned villagers.
New Barracks zone added. Soldiers sleep there and use Training dummies to train combat skills.
Guards occupy the guard posts and chase and capture any criminals.
Soldiers train with their equipment and prepare themselves for war.
Soldiers reside in the barracks and eat food from the warehouse. They receive soldier pay once a season, that the player can manage in the villager book.
Soldiers can be promoted to generals. This improves survival chances for soldiers in war.
New weapon-mastery skills added
New Royal Tax Type: Regiments
Soldier regiments can be sent to war. Some of the soldiers may return alive after the war ends.
Player can manage equipment preferences for military regiments. Members of the regiment will seek to equip this equipment if available in the warehouse.
Royalty demands soldier regiments as part of the yearly targets. First year does not demand any soldiers. System is slowly ramping up through the first five years, when it reaches maximum (but still randomized) demands.
Regiments requested by the king in the current year generate an equipment template. Players can set this template when managing equipment, to make sure that the regiment meets the royal requirements.
Regiments have a soldier pay, which must be maintained to keep high morale. Soldiers donate portion of this money to their original family.
Soldiers can receive war veteran status if they survive the war. This improves their chances to survive another war and make them more valuable as generals.
New clergy zone Shrine allows regiments, that are marked to be blessed, to participate in the blessing ceremony. Blessing costs holy water and it improves their chance of survival in battle.
New Construction System: Builder Professions and Builder Tiers
Each structure is marked with a tier - default tier can be built by anyone without restrictions. Other structures needs either a carpenter family or architect family.
New professions of Carpenters and Architects and a new Carpentry and Builder's Guild zone. These families take care of construction of advanced structures.
They also produce basic and advanced repair kits, which villagers must purchase to perform repairs.
Added optimization of hauling resources for multiple blueprints at once.
Health and Happiness Update
Villagers can now develop health conditions. These include injuries, fractures and sicknesses. Injuries and fractures can happen as a result of labor or combat. Sicknesses develop randomly over time. When villager is freezing, the likelihood is increased. Sicknesses also spread through proximity to other villagers.
Added new hospital zone and a tending station structure where people can heal their injuries and isolate with sickness. Clergy can assign nurses that will feed the sick and treat them with salve, bandages and cure.
Extended Tutorial
The tutorial has been redesigned and significantly extended to include new chapters that guide players through all features of the game:
Regular construction tasks are replaced with quests introducing the builder professions and enlisting servants to perform work previously done by ruling family.
After the inn is built, the tutorial continues with quests about establishing clergy, building churches, tavern, welcoming first noble family and donations with clergy. It also introduces new content by guiding the player through military content, creating regiments, recruiting soldiers, changing their equipment and preparing barracks, jail and execution.
We strongly recommend playing through the new tutorial before engaging with the new content, as it can clear out a lot of confusion about the game mechanics.
New Activity: Criminal Acts
Villagers can now commit criminal acts of vandalism, theft and murder.
Villagers can lockpick doors when attempting criminal acts. Any door can be lockpicked, but it slows them down.
Villager committing a crime has a chance to be spotted by nearby guards. Chance is higher if they are closer to the guard and they will also pick a path that does not get too close to guard posts.
Added ability to imprison criminals and manage their sentence length, including execution order.
Changing sentence lengths can improve or damage reputation with impacted family.
New Executioner special role added. Soldiers can be assigned to it and the selected executioner will perform executions.
New Jail zone with Jail bench and Jail chair structures for captured prisoners.
New Execution Site zone with execution display and public stage structures to perform scheduled executions. Executions apply settlement debuff that reduces criminality chance, but hurt relationship with affected families.
Minor Features
Added support for Steam cloud saves and unique Steam ID accounts.
Villagers and animals have the ability to flee from combat and be chased by the agressor.
Villagers now go to sleep at semi-random times, to prevent behaviour of everyone getting up to sleep at the same time.
New arrow indicators on access points to help identify direction of usage.
New UI for ground storage restriction.
When selecting a wild animal, players can mark the animal to be either leashed away or killed. This will trigger guards to leash the animal outside of the zone boundaries, or killed pre-emptively. Hunters can still collect the corpses but only if they are within the hunters area (this may be addressed later).
All zoned corpses are now automatically claimed by the ruling family and stored in the knackery by servants. This should help clearing them out so they don't block construction.
Time during night speeds up earlier and it is significantly faster to reduce waiting times during night. It will automatically slow down if a nightly special event occurs (i.e. theft attempt).
Both mood and happiness is now displayed in the population book.
Expanded description in the detail of villagers to give more information, including progress of studies for novices in clergy.
Added terms of service page in menu.
Added an option to opt out of analytics in the settings and secured general compliance with GDPR.
Added settings to manage monitor in fullscreen.
Walking speed is now impacted by injuries and weight of equipment.
Added indicators of pregnancy to the population book.
Walls, roofs and structure now indicate durability and insulation qualities.
Villagers now have underwear when they have no clothes.
Added several types of pies as a recipe for bakers. They consume flour and fruits.
When resources are granted, the purchase list is immediately updated. This results into immediate update of the tooltip for what family needs.
Balancing Changes
Need system has been rebalanced. Happiness and mood is calculated more accurately and it now also takes into account player reputation.
Added rope as a cost requirement to several structures.
Updated starting resources both in tutorial and standard game.
Updated balancing of combat strength and defense.
Significantly increased amount of gold for nobles, as well as their passive yearly income.
Removed secondary bonus/penalty on relationships with families when granting or seizing. Now only relationship with target family is impacted. This was causing undesired effects and was especially troubling with nobles, and made them leave settlement.
Balanced insulation and durability qualities of walls, roofs and structures to reflect quality of used material better.
Redesigned system of joining combat to protect kin. Animals and villagers now have a chance to join combat or flee from danger.
Animals will not fight back during tutorial mode active.
New structure Blast Furnace added and replaced Oven in selected zones, to split the amount of recipes put on one structure type.
General improvements around economy stability, pricing, nobles satisfaction, clergy demands and taxation.
Regular game now begins with default servants and guards enlisted.
Increased yields of crops by 15-20%
Optimized resource prioritization for animals - first they consume acorns, then grain, then straw and then everything else. Purchasing behavior of these ingredients is still driven by cheapest price per weight.
Bug Fixes
Significant performance optimization around memory usage and loading times.
Roofs can now be built over a bar that is occupied.
Caravans will now store gold in their storage to allow sharing it for purchasing.
Fixed issues with families leaving with their animals.
Warehouse book was slightly redesigned and optimized to reduce stuttering when switching between pages.
Several fixes regarding AI crashes, leading to Doing Nothing behavior.
Fixed a minor bug with flailing spot.
Fixed visual error with statues in ground storages.
Fixed sorting issues with graves and plants.
Fixed issue with smelters harvesting clay in their households,
Nobles will now properly reduce their interest to stay if the tavern is not able to serve them excellent meals.
Fixed a bug with nobles causing them to spawn with low amount of money.
Fixed issue with scrolling the map at the edge of the screen with mouse cursor.
Fixed issue with incorrectly initializing lights and weather effect after loading.
Fixed issue with roofs sometimes incorrectly masking off weather effects.
Head of the ruling family starts with reading and writing learned.
Improved generation of structures in the starting area.
Fixed issue with chickens not laying eggs.
Several issues and crashes present in the previous version identified and fixed.
Law and Order Enhances Your Experience In The Criminality and Military Update!
The release of the new update is approaching very soon, so here is a last update teasing the upcoming content! Today, we are focusing on the criminality, law and health aspect.
Villagers will have the capacity to commit some truly evil acts! They will take out their frustration on the property of others and vandalize construction, causing it to be immediately in need of repairs. They will sneak in the zones of their neighbors, especially your warehouse, in attempts to steal, and to sort a truly deep and hurtful conflict, they may even resort to a murder.
Sneaky Little Devils
Of course, aside from vandalism, which is quite impulsive, your villagers will not be so blatant about it. They will try to perform their crimes fast and before anyone can see them. And they will not be stopped by a mere door! Picking locks takes time, but eventually, they can get through any door. However, they are a strategic element in stopping them before it is too late.
As we covered in our fist update, you will be able to recruit soldiers and assign them to regiments with selected gear. One of these regiments are day guards, night guards, day jailers and night jailers. As the name would suggest, guards would be in charge of protecting your settlement, while jailers look over the prisoners in the new Jail zone.
For you, guard is a strategic resource. You can only manage to have so many, and it is impossible to guard the whole village. Place down guard posts in the areas that you hold the most dear. Your guards will occupy them and look out for any criminal on sight. Once a villager enters their sight range during a criminal act, they have a chance to be discovered. And, the longer they can stay within that range, the higher the chance they will not go unnoticed. So, a guard post in front of a door is probably your best chance of catching them.
Path of A Criminal
While you can go the way of the muscles and set up guards wherever you can, maintaining villagers' happiness is still your best chance of reducing crime. The more unhappy your villagers grow, the more likely they are to start committing crimes. And they will typically target those who have a bad standing with them. Thus giving raise to the vicious cycle of criminality. Lower happiness means bad relationships, which fuels criminal acts, which fuels more frustration.
And, if you are successful in catching a criminal, they will end up in jail. You can now place down a jail bench or jail chair, which determines an area of a cell. Each criminal, once defeated in combat, is dragged to their designated bench, and left there to rot. Jailers will regularly bring them food and once their sentence is over, release them to freedom. Each sentence is determined automatically based on their crime, so you don’t have to worry about it, if it is not your cup of tea. But, you can update this sentence to any length you wish. Making it shorter will gain you favor with their family, while extending it will hurt your standing with them.
There is, however, one type of sentence, which is final. Once you order an execution, it is truly an end for them. But first, you will need to dedicate one of your guards to be an executioner, and build an Execution Site - a new zone with Execution Display and Public Stage. Here, the head of your family will gather with the rest of your village to publicly execute any incriminated person. This will send the message that no criminal act will be tolerated, and for a time, you may see them withhold from any cruel actions, despite their frustrations. However, executing a criminal significantly hurts your standing with their family, so choose wisely.
Healthy Body, Healthy Mind
New update will also introduce the mechanics of injuries, fractures, and sicknesses. Villagers can hurt themselves in combat or during heavy labor. They can also get sick as a result of bad weather, or when they come in contact with an infected visitor.
Illnesses and injuries reduce their chance of survival, slow down their movement and reduce their mood and happiness. For severe injuries and illnesses, they will seek treatment at a local hospital and obtain salve, bandages or cure - new healing material produced in the apothecary by the clergy.
Especially for illnesses, they want to be isolated, so they don’t spread the sickness to others, so you should make sure to build a hospital - new clergy zone, where all sick people seek treatment from nurses - a new clergy order.
We hope you will enjoy this new update! We have covered a lot, and yet so much is still not mentioned. From the numerous bugfixes, balancing updates, UI improvements, performance overhaul, or even cloud save support, there is so much to desire! The update will arrive soon, so stay tuned, join us on Discord, and let us know in the comments, what is your favorite feature!
Expand your Demesne In the Upcoming Update!
We are approaching the release of the new Military and Criminality update, so it is time to take a look at another major part of the awesome new features - your demesne!
A lot goes into governing a feudal land. Not only does your ruling family need a place to stay and infrastructure to manage resources they exploit, they need to make sure everyone follows the rules, fulfill their duty and develop economies of great craftsmanship and care. All of this is a lot of labor, quite too much to rest on the shoulders of a few noble aristocrats.
To solve this problem, we are introducing servants. You will be able to recruit peasants in their ranks and assign them various duties that are all necessary to keep your manor clean and functional.
Hard Work For Lay Folk
Once you recruit a servant, they will leave their families and join your demesne. They still maintain relationships and contact with their loved ones, but their daily lives are governed entirely by you and the kind of responsibility you assign to them.
Labourers are in charge of any heavy labor. They will handle basic construction, manage and store resources, relocate animals and corpses, tune the temperature in your manor and other public areas and perform regular repairs of your equipment.
Cooks are the masters of good taste. They will occupy your personal kitchen, a new zone with cooking facilities dedicated specifically to your servants. They will use resources from your warehouse and cook for your whole demesne. Not only for you, but for the entire serfdom, your soldiers, guards and other employees.
Stablehands are the animal caretakers of your herd and they are in charge of stables, a new zone dedicated to animals that you personally own, including the newly added horses. They make sure the feeders are full, your horses are groomed and ready for a ride, they milk your cows, shear your sheep and collect the eggs from your chicken. They will also purchase animals from the market with your money, much like farmers would for their own family, or attempt to tame them from the wilderness.
Take Charge of Your Animals
With servants introduced to the game, we have now been able to support the ability to own and care for any kind of animal by the ruling family as well. Not only will your servants extract the benefits of animal husbandry solely for your benefit, you now have access to animals in the warehouse book, and you can freely buy, sell, grant or seize animals from others!
Construction Professions and Tiers
Another major change coming with the new update, is streamlining the construction and outsourcing it to dedicated families of builders. We are introducing two new zones and professions - Carpenters and their Carpentry, and Architects and their Builder’s Guild.
Without them, your villagers will be able to build only a basic set of objects. Hay wall, some simple beds, a fireplace, storages and basic necessities needed to survive under any circumstances. To upgrade yours and theirs lifestyle, you will need to deploy specialized families on your land.
While there are some exceptions, generally any wood-based construction is handled by the carpenters, while anything made from stone or steel is handed to the architects. Each structure will now indicate who can build it, and the blueprints will have a different color - white tint remains for the basic structures, while blue represents carpenters and orange represents architects.
Everything else is streamlined! Once you put down a blueprint, the responsible family will walk to a storefront of a nearby builder and place an order. These builders now have a contract for construction. They will purchase any resources needed and furnish the construction at once. And if the responsible family has a surplus of the needed materials (that is they would otherwise try to sell them), builders will use them and reduce the price for their services by their cost. Once the construction is finished, the family will make the payment for the cost of the material and some extra margin to pay for their labor.
This applies not only for regular families, but also for you, so make sure you have some gold prepared, so that you can motivate them to work for you. These builders are also using their Builder’s Desk to produce Repair Kits, a new resource allowing villagers to perform repairs on a deteriorated structure.
With this change more than ever before we have seen the need to optimize the resource management during construction, so in the next update you will also see villagers pickup resources for several constructions at once, significantly speeding up any construction.
So, what do you think? Are you excited to enlist servants in your demesne? Do you like the new tier system? While it may introduce some obstacles in your constructions, we believe these types of challenges are a lot of fun and make the game a lot more immersive and interesting. Let us know what you think!
As always, you are most welcome to join our Discord server and become a part of our community. We will be really happy to see you there!
Recruit An Army In the Upcoming Military and Criminality Update!
Lords & Villeins will receive a wholesome content update soon and we thought we'd share some of the new features with you! Since you're such a supportive community, you deserve nothing less!
While the full changelog will be revealed along with the update release, today we wanted to focus on the military part of our Military and Criminality update, and share with you how the warmongering attempts of the royals will soon enhance your medieval ruling experience.
War Never Changes
As you progress through your settlement and attract craftsmen around the world, the royals will become interested in exploiting your people for their war. You will have some time to prepare, but once you reach the fourth year, the first regiment will be requested.
It is time to train an army! Set up a regiment of soldiers, recruit peasants to their ranks, promote their general and there you go. Farmers, foragers, bakers, anyone you can find that is not contributing to your society well enough, can find a new purpose with a weapon in their hand.
The requests are specific, the royals know what they need and they will not hesitate to ask. Footman soldier, rangers, or even cavalry with a well-trained and equipped horse. You can, of course, customize within limits, but it is your responsibility to make sure your soldiers have the equipment they need, and have enough time to train with their weapon.
All of your soldiers will reside in the barracks, a new zone where they can sleep, train with training dummies and spend their free time. You will have to pay them a fair wage, if you want to keep their morale high. Money that will support their family, and occasionally gets lost in the pub as your soldiers grab a cold one. They will consume food from your warehouse, so stay tuned for our next teaser, where we reveal servants and cooks!
Once their training is over, you are ready to fulfill the request and send them to war. At your order, the whole regiment will gather, collect what they need and leave your settlement at once. We never wanted Lords and Villeins to be a combat heavy game, so we will not support the spectacle of the battle itself, but the prospect of recruiting and training an army of soldiers remains a powerful immersive storytelling element that always felt like a good fit to us. It is not just for a show- curating your army involves many difficult choices that put lives of your villagers at a significant risk because only a handful of them will return home alive!
There is a lot more to the military than we’ve shown you today. Stables with horses for your cavalry, how servants are a key part of your military success or how your recruits can also be dedicated to protect your villagers from crime, so stay tuned for more!
Are you looking forward to this update? We certainly are! The update is right now in a closed beta, so we don't want to promise any exact date of release, but once we know more, we'll definitely let you know!
As always, you are most welcome to join our Discord server and become a part of our community. We will be really happy to see you there!
Minor Update v0.15.17 Released!
For the second round of hotfixes for the recently released Nobility and Clergy update, we have been focusing on AI, crashes and added few extra UI improvements. Especially those of you, who are playing on bigger maps, will certainly find useful the ability to change the frequency of autosaves in the settings, or turn them off alltogether! We have addressed a lot of issues, so let's just jump into the changelog right away.
We are monitoring both the Steam forums and conversations on our Discord. You can also mail us your feedback to info@lordsandvilleins.com. If you wish to file a bug report, please make sure to include a screenshot and ideally a save file and player logs, that can be located in Users\[USER]\AppData\LocalLow\Honestly Games\Lords and Villeins\ and the SaveData subfolder.
Major Bugs Fixed
Fixed several issues with trash pile management.
Fixed a bug that caused an accounting report not to show the previous season.
Fixed a crash caused when villagers are removing a knackery with corpses inside.
Fixed several crashes with AI causing them to be "Doing nothing" and eventually starving or freezing.
Fixed bug with Coinmakers not making money from silver or copper.
Fixed an issue with the calculation of donations to the clergy by noble families. This is a likely cause behind frequent departures of nobles despite limited donations done by the player.
Fixed an issue with building a structure that causes the creation of an unclickable and unremovable blueprint.
Fixed an issue with animal procreation needs, preventing them from reproducing.
Fixed scaling for animal generation frequency on bigger maps.
Fixed an issue with caravans not coming to town perpetually, after a deadly incident.
Fixed a few issues causing corrupted save files and preventing the game from saving.
Fixed an issue with caravans getting temporarily stuck when leashing animals during departure.
Fixed issue causing villagers of exiled families constantly leash animals to the edge of the map.
Fixed an issue making it possible for a villager or an animal move into a structure that was under construction and becomming permanently stuck
Fixed an issue causing lag spikes when villagers tried to enter an inaccessible area
Fixed an issue causing villagers to be stuck when they try to empty bar after sitting on a chair
Improved the pricing system to reflect long existing stock that has not been sold off. This should drive prices down the more villagers compile produced resources and trigger caravans to become interested in purchasing. We have identified this to be the main reason for a low caravan interest.
Fixed an issue with ground resources not being sold by caravans.
Minor and/or Visual Bugs Fixed
Fixed an issue causing villagers selling ingredients that they should not be selling.
Fixed an issue with donating money to multiple families.
Fixed an issue that occured when family left the villager while the ledger book was open.
It is no longer possible to expel the ruling family.
Increased threshold for cursor detection on edges of the screen to address issues with map mouse scrolling in specific resolutions.
Fixed an issue causing families to not clear their storefront when they are expelled.
Fixed an issue with the appearence of graves in specific rotations.
Fixed visual issue with fireplace always appearing to be on even when it is off.
Added silver and copper jewelery to the supported resources of the cabinet storage.
Updated tooltip of the oven to say "Heating" instead of "Baking".
Fixed an issue with statues not generating statue resource when removed.
Fixed an issue causing wool and gem ore to not be collected under stewardry.
Fixed issue with negative demand displayed in the market presence.
Fixed issue with butchers slaughtering animals before they had a butchering table.
Fixed a visual issue with decorations placed ona table (i.e. candle).
The price list now shows prices for meals and alcohol served at the bar.
Fixed the description text of the feeder to display assigned animals correctly.
Added missing resources to the farmland production list (Wheat, Barley, Oat, Rye, Rice).
Balance Changes
All equipment now lasts two years. This should give players more time to establish a tailor and reduce the amount of rags in the economy.
Increased beauty need satisfaction from art, to prevent villagers constantly interrupting their tasks to look at statues.
Clergy is no longer limited by amount of villagers that can do cooking.
Price for bed at the inn / tavern as well as profit from sold beverages has been increased.
Ruling family no longer has to pay for the bed at the inn if they are forced to sleep there. On the other, they now must pay for any beverages they consume.
Optimized prioritizes for attending church and holding Sunday Service.
Reduced penalty for not having all villagers attending Sunday Service (only 75% of the settlement must attend)
Updated the world generator to generate fruit trees and flowers in the grassfields more often, while reducing the likelihood inside of the forest.
Butchers will now stop purchasing animals if the potential profit from their butchering yields are lower than the animal price.
Reduced frequency of villagers drinking at the inn.
Increased all prices by 25%, together with the amount of gold villagers carry.
Reduced prices of fish, meat and sausages, to make them competitive with other food ingredients and give butchers and fishers a chance to profit.
Reduced prices of straw and acorns to make villagers prioritize them as animal food.
Increased the starting amount of wood and removed wooden planks from the cost of the wooden wall.
Reduced the heat generated by fireplace, campfire and oil lamp.
Further reduced vegetation spread
Novices will continue to build despite a functional library, if there is nobody assigned to the monk order.
Teenagers can now operate the storefront.
The maximum amount of animals on a map has been increased.
Sizes of starting families have been increased (particularly fishermen).
Sizes of all spawned families have been increased to make presence of two-member families very rare. This also boosts tourism and increases external consumption at the inn.
Stone paving now costs 2 stone tiles instead of 1 stone.
Reduced probability of pets producing an offspring.
Villagers will now purchase beer or mead at random.
Increased profit per alcohol glass.
Increased prices of meals at the inn and the tavern.
Reduced price of grain to make production of bread more profitable.
Reduced time to produce flour in the mill.
Increased time to process an animal corpse by the butchers.
Cost of animals is reduced relatively to the cost of meat, to make butchering more profitable.
Sausages, cheese, bread and butter have been moved to a new cooking ingredient category called Made Products. Pastry category has been removed.
Production of sausages now also requires grain.
Prices of meat and sausages have been reduced so they can compete on the market with other ingredients.
Villagers now go to the bed two hours later (10 PM).
Increased the amunt of money families start with.
Caravans stay for three extra days to give them more time to purchase surplus goods from various storefronts around the settlement.
Quality of Life Improvements
"Money" resource category appears on the top in the ledger.
Added extra condition for visitors to appear - there now must be a bar at the tavern / inn built as well.
All villagers are now able to collect fruits and blueberries from trees in their zones. Only farmers are able to plant them.
Added a question mark icon in the tooltip of selected structures, which brings up the structure tooltip from the build menu.
Added indicator to the structure tooltip if a structure has visual variations.
Added option in settings to manage the frequency of autosaves.
Animal age group is now displayed in the animal tooltip when selected.
The hover tooltip on the clock has been expanded with counters for tax payment days.
Minor Update v0.15.12 Released Addressing Bugs, Feedback and Balancing!
We have gathered your feedback, hunted down many bugs and issues, improved on balancing and added few quality of life improvements. Thank you all for continuously participating in the conversation, sharing your thoughts and reporting all the issues you were able to find! It helps us learn about our players and identify problems much more quickly and easily.
Where to share your feedback effectively? We are monitoring both the Steam forums and conversations on our Discord. You can also mail us your feedback to info@lordsandvilleins.com. If you wish to file a bug report, please make sure to include a screenshot and ideally a save file and player logs, that can be located in Users\[USER]\AppData\LocalLow\Honestly Games\Lords and Villeins\ and the SaveData subfolder.
We hope this patch will bring you a lot smoother experience with Lords and Villeins and leave you looking forward to our upcoming Military and Criminality update in a few months!
Major Bugs Fixed
Fixed issue with clergy taxes not accounted correctly.
Fixed bug with nobles that left map but did not unassign their work zone.
Fixed a bug that caused money to be ignored in the value of donations to clergy.
Fixed clergy planting trees in treespots that are meant to be removed.
Fixed a bug with donating money (to any family) not working properly.
Disabled priority screen on Graveyard, Library and Theatre (it was not intended to be there).
Fixed a serialization issue with a theatre zone causing villagers to interrupt ongoing acting after reload.
Fixed an AI reservation issue with Grape Mashing Tub.
Fixed an AI bug with villagers not performing tasks after they join settlement or are enlisted to clergy, until the game was reloaded.
Fixed a bug where visuals of the book would not show when villagers are studying reading and consecration.
Fixed a bug with certain assets not generating heat (candles, torches and oil lamps).
Added a prevention mechanism for scenario where two villager that are near fainting are trying to save each other in a loop.
Fixed a bug causing markings of objects that are meant to be removed not being loaded.
Fixed a bug in the world generator that could lead to black dots on the map.
Fixed a bug that could lead to blocked buildings and unremovable blueprints on the map.
Fixed a bug with purchasing from clergy that could occur when there was no bishop yet.
Fixed a bug with cellar and brewery clearing barrels that are not meant to be cleared.
Fixed a bug causing Rags not to be conusmed when filling paper mill.
Fixed a bug where villagers store paper stacks in the same writing table while producing manuscripts.
Fixed a bug when inn or tavern zone is removed while being assigned.
Fixed a bug that could occur after a persons death.
Minor and/or Visual Bugs Fixed
Fixed visual issue with the theatre stage in particular rotations.
Removed Gem Ore from the consumption list of the Artist's Workshop and Steel Plates form the Tannery zone.
Fixed an incorrect sprite orientation of the big fallen tree asset.
Fixed a bug in the population book not displaying scroll bar in the zone ownership section.
Fixed unintended behavior where any family would automatically cut down trees if assigned to a foraging zone. The foraging profession is now required.
Fixed a bug that caused yields from fishing nets to be no longer randomized. It can now yield 1 - 4 fish per harvest.
Fixed UI bug in the Marriage Request screen.
Fixed bug that was marking day 15 as the Sunday Service day.
Balance Changes
Added penalty on reputation for expelling peasant families.
Royalty should now request more reasonable amounts for fruits in royal taxes.
Pregnant mothers and primary caretakers awaiting adoption can no longer be enlisted to clergy.
Added more access points to a fireplace structure. Fireplace now also generates more heat than a campfire.
Increased time multiplier speed when all villagers are sleeping and made the night appear brighter.
Increased priority of initiation of novices to make it more likely to happen.
Added debuff for clergy that should prevent them from immediately selling off granted resources the next day.
Changed recommended structures in Church from stone furniture to wooden furniture (better furniture is still allowed).
Following the ruleset of animals, chicken bed is now also ignored by chickens if it is not placed within the zone they are assigned to (i.e. it must be in the farm).
Added a demand for yarn for fishermen to maintain stock of yarn to repair their fishing nets.
Slightly reduced building times of walls and roofs.
Caravans are now more likely to bring resources that the settlement is not able to create.
Improved the speed of masoners to produce stone slightly faster.
Slightly increased starting paper and manuscripts.
Rice Grain was excluded from the profitability system and is always regarded as profitable.
Removed limitation on cooking personal for families with inn or tavern.
Cooking can no longer interrupt bar occupation or storefront occupation to further optimize economy and AI behavior.
Quality of Life Improvements
Grant tab of the warehouse book now shows how satisfied the clergy is with current donations.
Added Villa as a household dedicated for nobles.
Added trashpile owner indicator in the tooltip of the trashpile inventory.
Added error indicator in the sell tab of the warehouse book if a warehouse storefront is missing.
Campfire and fireplace moved to the decorations category to be together with other light / heat sources.
Increased the width of the resources scrollbar in the left section of the HUD.
In tutorial added new quest to salvage clay rocks.
Manuscripts category have been changed from Material to Commodity.
Added new loading screen key art.
Nobility & Clergy Update Has Been Released!
We are excited to bring you a new major update, delivering on our second major milestone with a Nobility and Clergy update! We've listened to a lot of feedback and added some highly requested features, so if you want to know the details, check out the changelog for v0.15.6! For a more in-depth look, check out this article covering all new features in this update. Or, if you are simply looking for something to get you excited to play, watch this brand new teaser.
[previewyoutube="GjnkhKuoitQ;full"]
We are happy to welcome all players on our Discord where you can share with us your feedback and ask questions. Our community recently passed 1000 members, so you will definitely not be alone there!
Major Features
Noble families are now part of the game. They have different needs, higher requirements and more personal freedom, and can perform new set of noble professions!
Noble families can now leave the settlement if the reputation with the player is minimal.
The family book UI has been expanded with a new tab that separates noble and peasant families.
New zone Tavern is a noble counterpart to the Inn zone. It serves better meals and attracts noble families.
New noble professions and zones alchemists's workshop, jeweler's workshop, artist's workshop, theatre and mint have been implemented.
New resources - gem ore and gems, gold rods, potions, statues, art, mead, paper, manuscripts, glass, honey and wax.
New structures - various statues and workshops, beehives, homegrowing pots for herbalists, desks and more!
Wall and table decorations - new objects that can be placed on walls and tables. Torches, candles, windows and more!
New peasant zone glass mill that produces glass from sand and wood.
Marriage proposals - player can propose marriage deals with other noble families.
Noble families can leave if they are unhappy or have a bad relationship with the ruling family.
Clergy is part of the game. - clergy is a unique family type, that shares all resources and maintains a singular reputation with the player family.
Villagers can be enlisted to clergy as novices, initiated to become monks and assigned to clergy orders to perform labor.
New zones Chapel and Church where bishop and minister hold Sunday Service each 7th and 14th day of a season.
Furniture variation - players can press R to select from different cosmetic options when placing furniture. Several new types of furniture have also been added.
New icons that better indicate what is being removed on a given location (replaces the red cross with specific indicators).
Each zone can define a clergy tax for socage and fee-farm. It acts as regular tax, but instead to the ruler it is transferred to the clergy quarters during the tax payment day.
New Clergy zones and professions - Apiary, Library, Scribery, Cemetery, Paper Mill and Apothecary.
New zone Quarters for Clergy is prioritized for storage of clergy taxed resources and serves as a common household for clergymen.
Villagers can learn Skills. Skills give villagers access to new tasks and have specific ways of obtaining them in game.
Ability to select different map sizes and major performance optimization to support them.
Vegetation now spreads automatically over time, i.e. trees, grass and flowers duplicate in a surrounding area to a given limit of density, depending on the terrain type.
Major rebalancing of prices, production times and recipe resource costs and yields.
Added support to directly purchase goods from all families, including peasants, caravans, nobles or clergy.
Updated world generation to generate all types of mountains, including gold ore, silver ore and bronze ore.
Villagers will no longer produce goods when their production is not profitable. Players are notified about this and the information is also displayed in the price list UI screen.
Redesigned majority of UI elements with improved textures, icons and effects. We will be focusing on more options on fonts in the future.
Significant amount of bugs have been hunted down and mercilessly fixed.
Minor Features
Noble families receive passive income once a year. This includes more luxurious resources and money.
Noble families will spend free time observing art, watching theatre or visiting the tavern.
Villagers are now sensitive to their status. If other families of the same social class are more wealthy, it will reduce their relationship with the player family.
New chapters "Clergy", "Abilities" have been added to the tutorial book. Other chapters have been expanded with new pages.
Tavern and Inn can now consume Mead Barrel to serve Mead Glass in the Bar.
All villagers can now cut down trees or harvest rocks and receive the yields from it (wood, stone or clay).
Foragers can now collect clay rocks from the forest as a prioritized resource.
Steel rods have been moved from Smelters to Blacksmiths. Smelters now produce ingots only.
Ability to hide blueprints with a toggle in the bottom right section of the HUD.
Villagers can salvage equipment that they no longer want to wear. This can yield resources like Rags from Clothes. Villagers automatically donate Rags to clergy.
Ability to expel whole family from the map. Can only be done with peasants.
Clergy tax was incorporated in the accounting report screen.
Improvement on caravans to guarantee more usable goods in the supply.
Created save files are compressed to reduce file size by over 80%.
Different terrain types and floor structures affect movement speed of villagers
Soil degradation system has been redesigned to improve the behavior of the system.
Markets are now closed on Sunday as the settlement is meant to participate in the Sunday Service.
Noble families reduce reputation with the ruler on daily basis as long as one of their family members does not have reading or writing.
More zones and structures have been made available for public use. For example, all villagers can now access fireplaces in the warehouse to warm up.
New "Show more" button in the tooltip when a villager is selected opens the population book with the selected person page.
All the reviews and feedback are as always really appreciated! The more you hit us up with your opinions, the bigger potential will Lords And Villeins have. So let's get the Steam discussions going!
Lords and Villeins in the Steam Lunar New Year Sale!
Greetings, Lords and Ladies!
Time cannot be stopped, and so the year of the Ox is ending, and the year of the Tiger is starting. This can mean only one thing for all PC gamers: Steam Lunar New Year Sale is here! If you've been waiting for a chance to grab Lords and Villeins at a great price, wait no more - it is now at 15% off, with the possibility of even higher discount if purchased through the Dwarves and Lords bundle - the additional discount applies in full even if you already own the other game in it, Hammerting!
These incredible offers are valid now through February 3rd, so don't miss your chance and grab the game now!
And once you've played the game, please, give us feedback in form of a Steam review, in the discussions or come chat to our Discord server. It is very much appreciated and helps us make the game even better for our fans!
Nobility and Clergy Will Join Your Settlement in the Next Update!
As we are approaching the final stages of development on our upcoming major update - The Nobility and Clergy - it is time to share with you details on what's coming! This marks our second major update and during the months since the launch, hundreds of you shared your thoughts, suggestions, praise, and criticism on Steam, Reddit, and Discord, which helped us understand how you see our game and what is the best way to move forward. This is the main reason why we are in early access and we are happy to see it is for the benefit of the game! We also understand that being part of early access is asking our players for a lot of patience as we continue to deliver on the promised features, balancing, and overall quality of the game, so thank you for sharing your support during this process and remaining patient! Let's see what the next update brings!
Nobility Class
So far, you've been only responsible for the peasants. The feudal nature of the world they live in, which recognizes people primarily by their heritage and titles, makes it so that they don't have that many legs to stand on when it comes to fighting for their rights. This means your leverage as their lord is much higher. Whether you choose to have them live at the edge of poverty or uplift their lifestyle, is mostly in your hands, as they are all afraid of the consequences, should they disobey your rule.
But nobles are different. They won't simply accept what you think is right. And they put increased pressure on almost everything you do. A mere inn is not enough - you have to build a proper Tavern - a new zone with nice beds and sweet wine to serve, which will attract noble visitors to your settlement! Normal meals? Those are for peasants. You have to produce a variety of cooking ingredients and serve excellent meals. Taxing their zones is tolerable but you better be careful to not push it too far. Once you fail to please the nobles, they will leave your settlement and greatly harm your reputation!
You might ask yourself, why would you keep such a demanding and ungrateful class of citizens around? If not for the variety and fun of exploration, they bring luxury resources to your settlement. Nobles also receive regular supplies of money and luxury goods from their otherworldly endeavors and businesses, that can boost your economy. You can also propose marriage deals to other noble families, who will negotiate with you an exchange of partners and gold through the aristocratic practice of arranged marriage. Let's have a look at the new zones, that are managed by noble families.
Jeweler's Workshop
Nobility is status and it must be known to everyone at the first sight. Turn all the precious ores and gems from the mountains into beautiful jewelry with the help of jewel crafters. Nobles will be happy to purchase them and wear them to satisfy their cravings of wealth.
Alchemist's Workshop
It is being said that carrying a Philosopher's Stone is essential for long and prosperous life. Add some health potion and you are sure to outlast even the most healthy individuals. Or should you be interested in stamina potions or some potions of defense, alchemists are certainly your friends.
You might wonder what these potions actually do - they improve happiness and mood, slightly recover the energy of the villager and increase their defense, but if you want to know the truth, there is nothing magical about them. Just a good old-fashioned placebo effect covered up with fancy legendary stories from medieval charlatans.
Artist's Workshop
Decorate the large halls of your manor with outstanding paintings and statues, made by the most skillful hands of artists, who travel to your settlement to share their talents with you. For a hefty price of course.
Theatre
Actors and entertainers around the world will travel to your settlement and perform on the stage to entertain your noble villagers for a small entry fee.
Clergy
Covering the spiritual needs of your citizens is an essential part of your responsibilities, but it is more intricate than you might have thought! Clergy understands well their position in society and they do not hesitate to exert their influence. Whether or not it is going to be for your benefit is up to you.
As you maintain your reputation amongst your people, clergy will also maintain reputation with you. Providing donations on a regular basis, supplying them resources through taxation, and developing your settlement with churches and chapels is a sure way to improve it. Let's have a look at each of these systems in detail.
Donations
Clergy will regularly demand monetary donations from you, but also from every other noble family in your settlement! This brings an interesting powerplay. Other noble families want to maintain good standing with the clergy and if they are not happy with your rule, they may decide to increase their donations and put pressure on you in order to undermine your rule through clergy's influence. There is only one way to fight back - improve relationships with the noble family and maintain higher donations. You can exile a noble family too, but this will make all other noble families dislike you even more! And it works both ways - your donations put pressure on other noble families, who might decide to leave the settlement, if they can not keep up!
Taxation
Both socage - taxing a percentage of production - and fee-farm - collecting monetary rent - are now split into two parts. One portion is taxation, which will be provided to you. The second part is then donated to the clergy. While it is not necessary to tax every zone, you need to make sure, that clergy will get everything they need, to survive and thrive. A taxation is an ultimate form of supplying the clergy, as it does not increase pressure on donations from other noble families.
Sunday Service
Sunday Service is where clergy exerts their influence on people. The appointed minister holds the Sunday Service at the local church for peasants, together with the bishop doing the same for nobles in the chapel. If your reputation with the clergy is good, you will see your ruler's reputation improve and vice versa. Building a church and chapel is also necessary, as your villagers will demand from you the ability to practice their faith.
Enlisting to Clergy
Villagers may choose to join clergy voluntarily at an older age and since this decision is considered sacred, you will not have the power to prevent them from doing so. However, you may order them to join the monastery at any point in their life. They will leave their family and all of their possessions behind and devote themselves to service and practicing their faith.
All enlisted members join as novices and have to study manuscripts in the library to learn reading, writing, and consecration. Once they do, they can be initiated and become a bishop, minister, or monk. As monks, they can be assigned to various clergy orders, to perform different duties, while you manage how many people should be in each order. Each monk in the order then learns a new profession and operates in their designated clergy zone. Let's have a quick look at the new orders added to the game.
Winemakers - operate in the Cellar to plant and harvest grapes and use the grape mashing tub and brewing stations to brew wine and mead.
Beekeepers - operate in the Apiary to manage Beehives and produce honey for cooking and mead production, as well as wax for candles.
Librarians - operate in the Library and teach local nobles in the skills of reading and writing.
Papermakers - operate in the Paper Mill to recycle old rags into a paper mash and use the paper siv to produce stacks of paper.
Scribers - operate in the Scribery where they transcript writings and turn stacks of paper into manuscripts for the library.
Morticians - operate in the Graveyard where they assist with burials and maintain the graves from degradation.
Herbalists - operate in the Apothecary to plant and source herbs for the production of potions and healing materials.
With the addition of a graveyard, your villagers will receive free access to a commonly shared area, where they can bury their loved ones. We are also adding Quarters that serve as a communal household for all monks in the monastery, where they can cook meals, sleep and eat.
...and much more!
The list of new features and improvements does not end there! We have also done a lot of smaller improvements and additions, that are definitely worth mentioning.
Bigger Maps! - that's right! You will now be able to choose the size of the map. Starting from half the size of 64x64, doubling the size of the map with the 192x192 scale, or go even further up to 384x384 - 9 times bigger map than what we currently had! We have done a lot of improvements on the performance to support these map sizes, however, we must emphasize that anything bigger than 192x192 is still considered "experimental" - recommended only for highly performant PCs and will likely remain like this in the future.
UI improvements - many UI textures have been reworked and improved, as well as certain UI elements. You can now hide the HUD, access the population book from any highlighted NPC, or the finance book from any zone menu. We have also reworked the tiles for the zones, making them more readable and easier to see through, and added a new icon system to mark structures for removal.
Skills - skills are similar to professions in a way that they give villagers access to a new set of activities. Unlike professions, skills can't be leveled up and are not tied to the family. This allows us to better communicate, what each villager can and can not do.
Woodworking - we have expanded the abilities of each villager to work with the wood. Everyone is now able to cut down trees and receive the yields if they are marked for removal in their zone. They will also plant random trees in tree spots, allowing you to decorate your zones with greenery!
Furniture variants - most furniture structures now have three new visual variants! When placing a structure, press R to choose a new visual variant and bring more shine to your settlement.
Wall and table decorations - with a new category of objects, you can now place structures on top of tables and walls. This includes candles, torches, paintings and also windows!
Purchasing from any family - a highly requested feature to trade with families is now also supported. When a family opens their shop, you can commit to trade for the current market price on the goods they are offering.
New floors - we are adding two outdoor floors - roads - and also two new types of bridges - the stone bridge and the steel bridge.
Ability to exile - using a new action in the population book, you can exile a whole family of peasants out of your settlement, when they are no longer useful to you.
Balancing and Bugfixes
Balancing is also on the list of our priorities! Many of you have been reporting how difficult it is sometimes to maintain a stable economy in your village and how specific zones struggle for living or have difficulties maintaining production. We are aware of these issues and are striving to improve upon them in the next update. While having a stable and balanced game is a high priority for us, please keep in mind, that we are still in early access and due to the ever-evolving nature of the game, during stages where core game mechanics are still being added, it would be counterproductive for us to invest an extensive amount of time into maintaining the balance on the same standard of quality, as we will set for the full game. That being said, we will certainly bring several improvements during the next update, which should make the economy more stable and enjoyable and we've also focused on fixing several issues and bugs, particularly with our complex AI systems.
But When Is It Going Live?!
If you've got to the end of this article, surely you want to know, when we are releasing all of this amazing content. We are currently in the last stages of balancing and bug fixing and will need a few more weeks to finish it up, but if everything goes well, you can expect the update to go live at the beginning of February. Once again, thank you all for your patience. We have been blessed to learn how many of you are enjoying our game and we can't wait to share this next update with you.
We will be opening a closed beta for the new update soon, so make sure to join our Discord community, so you don't miss out on the chance to participate. Follow us on our socials to stay up to date and share your love for the game with your friends, if you wish to support us more! If you've missed our latest live Q&A, make sure to watch it on our Youtube, where we discuss also the longterm plans for the game. And don't forget to leave us a review here on Steam, we really appreciate the feedback!
The holiday season is here once again, and that can mean only one thing for all PC gamers: Steam Winter Sale is here! If you've been waiting for a chance to grab Lords and Villeins at a lower price, wait no more - it is now at 15% off, with the possibility of even higher discount if purchased through the Dwarves and Lords bundle - the additional discount applies in full even if you already own the other game in it, Hammerting!
These incredible offers are valid now through January 5th, so don't miss your chance and grab the game!
And once you've played the game, please, give use feedback in form of a Steam review, in the discussions or come chat to our Discord server. It is very much appreciated and helps us make the game even better for our fans!
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