What are the best Manor Lords settings? You might think a medieval city builder is a simple task for modern gaming PCs, but finding the right settings is still important to get the most out of your hardware and maximize performance. Below, you’ll find our picks for the best settings so you can build your empire with the best view possible.
The best graphics cards will barely break a sweat when running Manor Lords, largely due to its forgiving system requirements. However, nailing down the right graphics and gameplay settings is still important to ensure you get the most enjoyment out of your soon-to-be flourishing empire.
Best video settings for Manor Lords
Here are the best video settings for max fps in Manor Lords:
- Display Mode: Borderless fullscreen
- Resolution: 1920×1080
- Anti-aliasing: AMD FSR
- FSR Quality: Quality
- VSync: On
- Max Frame Rate: 120
- Sharpening: High
- Shader Quality: Ultra
- Shadow Quality: Ultra
- Postprocess Quality: Ultra
- Bounced Light Approximation: Ultra
- Volumetric Clouds: On
- Terrain Texture Resolution: Ultra
- View Distance: Ultra
- Grass Density: Ultra
- Grass Distance: Ultra
- Foliage Quality: Ultra
After testing Manor Lords at both 1080p and 1440p, a stable 120 fps is easily achieved using our test PC. While we could have left the frame rate unlocked, some very minor stuttering would occur when removed, and given the nature of the game, 120 fps is arguably twice the required frame rate to have an enjoyable experience. While display refresh rates will vary, you can just keep VSync enabled to avoid this, but this issue is only likely to impact uses with 144Hz or greater.
There aren’t a wealth of options to tweak should your PC not prove as capable of running this city builder quite as easily as ours does. When testing Manor Lords on Steam Deck, we found that a simple global lowering of the quality settings would get us where we wanted to be performance-wise.
If you find that lowering settings still isn’t doing the job, it’s well worth making sure you have the latest GPU drivers installed, especially if you are using an Nvidia graphics card, as a game-ready driver has been released for Manor Lords.
Best gameplay settings in Manor Lords
Here are the best gameplay and accessibility settings for Manor Lords:
- Autosave: 5 minutes
- Allow assignment to multiple control groups: On
- Tutorial popups: Off (after first playthrough)
- Reaction speed when enemy spotted: Slow down
- Cosmetic day & night cycle: On
- Interface scale: 1.0
While the gameplay settings are quite light in Manor Lords, one of the settings is off by default and has a negative impact on the immersive feel of the game world. Cosmetic day & night cycle is the setting in question and with it turned off, there is no day/night cycle. Turning this on really helps with immersion and just adds a touch of realism too.
There is just one true accessibility setting in Manor Lords, allowing for the interface size to be adjusted. While it may not seem like a game that would require a swathe of additional settings, consideration for players who may be color blind or carry other disabilities that impact gameplay would be nice to see moving forward.
How we tested Manor Lords
At PCGamesN, we use specific gaming rigs to test the best settings for performance and gameplay in the latest releases. Currently, our test rigs include the following components; Intel Core i7 11700F, MSI Ventus Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070, 32GB of DDR4 3,200MHz RAM, MSI B560 motherboard, running Windows 11.
We use the same rigs to ensure that every game we test is done under fair conditions. We will occasionally upgrade these rigs to ensure they don’t fall massively behind the market and what typical gamers are using based on the Steam Hardware Survey, and this allows us to aim for the highest quality possible in every game we test. In the case of Manor Lords, our rig is more than capable of running the game on the highest settings with no adjustments needed.
Can you play Manor Lords on an HDD?
Yes, you can install and play Manor Lords on an HDD, although as with any game, there are benefits to opting for an SSD instead.
As such, opting for one of the best SSDs for gaming is something we’d strongly advise based on the difference in performance and longer loading times we experienced between playing the game on both drive types.
How to monitor performance in Manor Lords
If you want to keep an eye on performance in Manor Lords, which doesn’t have in-built benchmarking, there are easy methods that work whether you’re using an Nvidia or AMD graphics card.
For Nvidia cards, ensure you have the Nvidia App installed and the in-game overlay enabled, then hit ALT + R in-game to bring up your performance monitor. With AMD cards, you can enable performance monitoring via the Radeon overlay using the shortcut CTRL + SHIFT + O.
Or, you can download free software like Frameview or CapFrameX, for a cleaner, more simplified benchmarking option that works with any graphics card.
If this data has you thinking it’s time to update your rig, we can take you through how to build a gaming PC in 2024 with a step-by-step guide from start to finish.