Marketplaces in Manor Lords are where all of the stuff your village needs to survive — stuff like firewood, food, and clothes — gets distributed. They’re not a way to make money, though. Your first exposure to them will likely be when you get an alert saying that a “family requests more market area for their stall.”
Our Manor Lords marketplace guide will explain how marketplaces work to distribute food, fuel, and clothes.
How marketplaces work in Manor Lords
In order to upgrade your Burgage Plots in Manor Lords, those plots need access to a marketplace supplied with fuel, food, and clothing. Building a marketplace is free, and any family that wants to can set up a stall in that marketplace at no cost.
Stalls in a marketplace will sell a mix of goods in one of those same three categories of fuel, food, and clothing. It’s unclear what triggers a family to set up a stall in the market, but, generally, it just kind of happens once you build up a surplus of any one type of good.
Marketplaces are based on priority, not proximity
Marketplaces offer the Burgage Plots around whatever’s for sale inside. But just the presence of a marketplace and stalls isn’t enough. Every family — and remember there can be multiple families on each Burgage Plot — requires one fuel and one food per month (in the winter, from December through February, they require two fuel per month).
What’s available in a marketplace gets picked up by families from the surrounding Burgage Plots, not distributed to them. That means the distribution isn’t even across all plots. It’s more of a first come, first served situation (and the ones that are closer just so happen to get there first).
In order to keep everyone happy and their needs met — both to keep your approval from dropping and for upgrading Burgage Plots — you’ll have to have enough food and enough kinds of food for everyone to pick it up from the market before those plots closest to the market come back for the next month’s supply. In the image above, for example, you can see that almost everyone picked up vegetables for the month (except for the plots farthest out), but only the few plots directly touching a marketplace got any berries.
The requirements to upgrade a plot aren’t one-time checks. Those plots require those goods every month thereafter. Upgrading from Level 1 to Level 2, for example, means that the food requirements for that Burgage Plot increase by one food per family per month.
Why aren’t my goods going to the marketplace?
As with everything in Manor Lords, keeping everyone fed involves a lot of moving pieces. Just growing or making food doesn’t always mean it’ll make it to the marketplace and then into your Burgage Plots (and then your families’ bellies).
First, check your granary and storehouse. Everyone will automatically drop their goods in those — different types of food get stored in each — but that doesn’t mean it’ll make it to a market stall. You might have to assign one family (or more, as your town grows) to the granary and storehouse. Those families will both go get stuff to store, but also set up stalls to sell that stuff.
Additionally, check your trading post (if you have one). When you set up a trade route, you establish a desired surplus. This is a way to make sure you don’t export goods you want to keep. This desired surplus applies to the granary and storehouse, so, if you set the surplus to aim for too high at the trading post, you’ll inadvertently prevent those goods from making it to the marketplace.
Hovering over a marketplace plot will show you how many stall locations are unclaimed inside. If you’re running out — or even if your town is just spreading out too far — you can always add another marketplace plot. Manor Lords treats all of the marketplaces in a region as one unit, but the stalls get built wherever there’s people with stuff to sell and others who need said stuff. Spreading out your marketplaces makes it easier for families to get what they need.
