Manor Lords is the biggest city-builder of the year, and with its latest patch, sales milestone, and discount, it's better and cheaper than ever.
In a press release, Manor Lords publisher Hooded Horse confirms that the game had passed 2.5 million sales - not bad when its solo dev's girlfriend said it would be lucky to get 7,000 wishlists. Clearly, that's cause for celebration, so the next big Manor Lords patch is leaving beta and heading to the main game.
Patch 0.8.004's headline change is the rollover to Unreal Engine 5, which should help deal with several bugs and crashes. However, there's plenty more directly relevant to players in here. Right up there is the introduction of fishing, which comes with associated ponds, jobs, buildings, and, of course, food.
Speaking of food, there's a new Butcher artisan conversion, finally allowing you to use excess sheep meat and create sausages. Thankfully, there are also new food spoilage rules, so if you end up with too much food, it shouldn't necessarily bite you too hard. Finally, a new weapon type - crossbows - allows you to train and hire crossbowmen for your army.
The full patch notes go into a lot more detail about all of those changes, but they also contain even more good news - publisher Hooded Horse is running a publisher sale on Steam, which means that Manor Lords is currently available for a 30% discount. That's the city-builder's biggest price drop so far, so if you're not one of those 2.5 million players yet, this could be your chance to get on board.
Check out our list of the best city-building games.
Sign up to the GamesRadar+ Newsletter
Weekly digests, tales from the communities you love, and more
I'm GamesRadar's news editor, working with the team to deliver breaking news from across the industry. I started my journalistic career while getting my degree in English Literature at the University of Warwick, where I also worked as Games Editor on the student newspaper, The Boar. Since then, I've run the news sections at PCGamesN and Kotaku UK, and also regularly contributed to PC Gamer. As you might be able to tell, PC is my platform of choice, so you can regularly find me playing League of Legends or Steam's latest indie hit.
Manor Lords dev responds to criticism of his city builder's updates, saying that while they're not always "impressive to show off," he wants to "focus on issues that people comment on"
Solo city builder dev says indie developers' efforts need to count: "You can't polish up that turd, you need to let go and move on"