Manor Lords: How to get sheep

How to get sheep in Manor Lords is something you’ll need to figure out fairly soon to make life easier. Starting your first sheep farm is expensive, but the long-term gains outweigh the initial high costs. Just maybe don’t go overboard in the sheep department at first, depending on which mode you play in.

Our Manor Lords sheep guide explains how to get your first sheep and what to do with them from there.

Manor Lords: How to get sheep

You can build a sheep farm immediately, and since it costs almost nothing, you should go ahead and plunk it down somewhere along with a pasture for it. You can build everything else around it that way and integrate the farm into your general village structure, instead of placing it further out where it’s harder to defend in case of invasion.

Livestock farms don’t come with animals built-in, so you need to buy at least one to get started. Manor Lords tells you to establish a trade route to import animals, which is a slightly confusing way of saying you need a livestock trading post.

Click on the trade tab, and build a livestock post. That’s all you need to do to set up a trade route.

Like with your regular trading post, you need one family to staff the livestock trading post before any of your deals can go through. Importing one sheep costs 30 regional wealth, though if you pick the right development point, you can reduce the cost a bit.

Regional wealth comes from selling excess goods at your trading post. You need most of your food and fuel in your first year, so accumulating enough wealth to buy several sheep isn’t something you should aim for. No good being rich when everyone’s dead.

Manor Lords sheep tips

It takes roughly an in-game month for your sheep delivery, the same as if you order a horse or an ox.

Sheep will produce wool at intervals, which you can process at a weaver’s cottage, and a family can then sell that at a market stall to fulfill the clothing stall requirement. That gets you one step closer to raising your settlement level, but if you just want to level up your burgage plots, it’s cheaper and faster to turn hides from a hunting camp into leather.

However, selling excess material at the trading post is an excellent way to increase your regional wealth – and taxable income – without harming your village’s chance of surviving the winter. It’ll just take a bit longer before you start to see those returns.

It’s also worth noting that even though you can build a sheep farm and pasture separately, you should build them together. The sheep farm mentions it has room for five animals, but the sheep I bought never went there. They only lived in pastures I built.

For more Manor Lords help, check out our beginner's guide, how to raise your settlement level, and recommendations for what to build first in the city-building strategy game.