The best developments to get first in Manor Lords

It feels a little bit like cheating in Manor Lords, but the development upgrades you can get can do some powerful things to improve your settlement. However, to balance things out, the development points you need to unlock these enhancements are given out very sparingly. In fact, you won’t get even close to the amount needed to unlock everything on the sphere grid. To make matters even more stressful, there’s no way to undo a choice you make, so any point spent in error is locked in until you start a new game. There’s none that can make your game harder, but if you pick one that offers no benefit to your current settlement or goals, it might as well be a negative in terms of the opportunity cost. For the best experience, here are the developments you should invest in first.

How to get development points

Before you can spend any development points in Manor Lords, you have to earn them. This is a slightly obfuscated system that you may not fully understand if you’re not paying close attention, but it does make sense once you know what’s going on. Development points are tied to you reaching new settlement levels. You can incrementally grow to a small village, a medium village, a large village, a small town, a medium town, and — finally — a large town. Each one requires a larger number of burgage plots and for you to upgrade more of them to higher levels. In any one settlement, you can earn six development points.

Best developments to get first

The development tree is broken down into four segments: farming, trade, gathering, and industry. Here are some of the best ones you can unlock early.

Is Manor Lords multiplayer or co-op?
The best Dragon’s Dogma 2 mods
Next week, Valorant gets its first new weapon since launch

Heavy Plow

No settlement can survive only on hunting and foraging for food. Farming is the only way to make sure your storehouses are well stocked with food, but even a fully staffed farm is painfully slow to harvest. The Heavy Plow upgrade adds a