What you need to know
- Since releasing last week, the highly anticipated medieval city-builder Manor Lords has quickly become one of 2024's biggest and most popular games.
- However, many players are currently experiencing crashes in it, prompting its solo developer Greg Styczeń to address the issue in a post on Monday.
- Styczeń has said that "99%" of all reported crashes are due to "old drivers," so make sure you've installed the latest drivers that are available for your GPU.
- If that doesn't work, and you have an older graphics card, you might also be able to solve the problem by making a tweak to one of Manor Lords' configuration files so the game doesn't default you to using AMD FSR. More information on that in the text below.
The highly anticipated medieval city-builder Manor Lords finally launched into Early Access on PC last week, and while the game is thriving right now — it's currently at the top of Steam and has hit a big sales milestone — many fans are currently experiencing crashes while trying to play it. It's been a frequently reported issue since release, prompting Manor Lords' solo developer Greg Styczeń to make a few statements about it on Monday morning.
"99% [of] crashes so far are old drivers. And when people say 'I updated the drivers,' I check logs and see old drivers," he wrote in a post on X (Twitter), referring to crash logs sent by players in the official Manor Lords Discord server. "The other is the game defaulting to FSR and people having older GPUs - for this you need to disable FSR in the settings.ini for now but that will be fixed soon."
So, there you have it — if you're running into crashing problems with Manor Lords, it's likely because you haven't updated your GPU drivers to the newest ones available. Make sure you download the latest drivers from NVIDIA, AMD, or Intel depending on which graphics card you have in your rig (in Windows, you can check by first opening the System Information app and then looking in Components > Display). Alternatively, you can also manage driver updates in NVIDIA GeForce Experience, AMD Adrenalin, or Intel Arc Control (get it here).
If that doesn't solve your problem and you happen to have a dated graphics card, there's a very good chance Manor Lords defaulting to using AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) is the culprit. As Styczeń said, this should get fixed in a future update to the game, but in the meantime you should be able to workaround it by deleting "fsr" out of the game's Settings.ini file and then saving it. You'll find it here: [Your Steam Drive]\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Manor Lords\ManorLords\Saved\Config\WindowsNoEditor.
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If your game is still crashing, make sure you leave a report in the Manor Lords Discord, as you've probably come across a bug that the developer isn't aware of yet. One player, for example, experienced a crash after their militia troops went outside of the playable map space to attack incoming enemies.
Notably, outside of these crashing issues, Manor Lords' performance seems to generally be pretty excellent — something that's not always the case with Early Access titles. My experience with it while playing it for my review was fantastic, though I did run into a few bugs. Still, you can look forward to smooth, stable performance overall.
As for what's next for the popular indie city-builder, Styczeń has confirmed that the next patch for the game will fix glitches causing instances of Homelessness, adjust the effectiveness of archer units (they got nerfed at launch), make the trade oversupply mechanic less punishing, reduce the rate at which your Baron rival claims territories, and buff the efficiency and storage capacity of Sawpits. Updates further out will also add additional development skills, a fleshed out diplomacy system, and more.
Manor Lords has quickly become one of 2024's biggest games, and is also one of the best PC games to play if you enjoy strategy gameplay. It's available on Steam, GOG, and the Microsoft Store, and is also playable on PC Game Pass (and, by extension, Xbox Game Pass Ultimate). When it eventually comes to Xbox, it'll also be on the console version of Game Pass as well.
The game's retail price is $40, but for a limited time, you can get it for $30 thanks to a launch sale. Specifically, this 25% discount will be available until May 10, so make sure you buy the game before then to take advantage of it.
