Guide: How to build efficient burgage plot sizes for vegetable gardens and/or orchards.

[Jabberwocky]

A lot of new players are confused about how large to make their burgage plots, especially for gardens and orchards. The ingame tooltips only say that bigger gardens will yield more produce, but don't give any further information. So I have decided to compile some information I found out, either by playing by myself or by watching others play, in order to help out others who need a little guidance and some more info about what garden sizes yield how much produce and so on.

Rule Nr 1: Always make your garden/orchard plots have double housing!
Rule Nr 2: The higher the level of the houses, the higher the garden's efficiency.

Apple orchards and vegetable gardens differ from each other. An orchard can just be planted, then be left alone for several years (during which it will either yield nothing or very little) until the apple trees are old enough to yield one unit of apples per tree. The families in the burgage plot have no issues harvesting even a very large apple orchard during harvesting season, before time for harvesting runs out.

Vegetable gardens need to be tilled and sown, and the harvesting also works a little differently. In order for veggies to be harvested, family members come from one of the houses, gather an armful of veggies, then run back to the house to put it into the pantry, rinse and repeat. This takes a long time on plots that are very long and have a lot of distance for the family members to walk back and forth, and can lead to inefficiency.

Rule Nr. 3: The distance from a house to the farthest point away in a vegetable garden should not be much more than the length of one-and-a-half corpse pits.

The corpse pit as a unit of measurement was discovered by Youtuber Tacticat, whose video guides you should also watch because a lot of the information here comes from him. A corpse pit is exactly 0.25 morgen in size (the game will round that to 0.3 morgen).

Rule Nr 4: A garden or orchard the size of 1 corpse pit (0.25-0.3 morgen) will yield approximately 45 units of food.

The following section will be dedicated to a step-by-step guide on how to build different sizes of orchards and gardens for different maximum yields. In order for all the screenshots to be displayed as thumbnails, I will make one post per build guide.

Attention! All information is based on Manor Lords version 0.7975.

In this current build, plant growth has been slowed by 30% in comparison to earlier builds, which causes both vegetable gardens AND apple orchards to reach their peak efficiency several years after being built. You can expect to only see their maximum yields once the burgage plot housing has reached level 3. This has been consistent throughout all my playthroughs during my, as of today, 264 hours of gameplay.

Small garden plot (approx. 45-60 food units per year):

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3276358055

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3276358481

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3276358826

[Jabberwocky]

Efficient combination of larger garden/orchard plots with smaller housing units (made by forum user "Fortigan"). Garden will yield approx. between 90-120 units of food per year:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3276357761

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3276359107
Draw a road around 4 corpse pits arranged in a 2x2 formation.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3276359358
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3276359599

*Malt House. Sorry, was typing away swiftly and didn't have the correct term committed to memory. When I say "malt maker", I mean the "malt house".
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3276360197
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3276360574
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3276360667

[Jabberwocky]

Youtuber "Tacticat"'s designs based on 2x3 corpse pits

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhfU5WLB3RA

For all these designs, draw a road around 2x3 corpse pits:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3261533394

Attention! Make sure the corners of your rectangle align with the corners of the map, and the roads you drew are parallel to the edges of the map! This will be important in order to maximize garden space and minimize housing footprint when building the burgage plots!

The Bender (approx. 270 food units per year at maximum). This setup minimizes walking distances for vegetable gardeners while maximizing tillable space in the backyard garden:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3261841690
Step 1: Delete 3 corpse pits, leaving an L-shape, and start building your burgage plot by starting one click from the bottom right corner and putting your second point right into the corner.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3261841751
Step 2: Bring your third point around the bend to the corner on top.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3261841586
Step 3: Bring your fourth point all the way around the bend to the bottom left corner. This should minimize the housing footprint as shown by the dashed line separating the houses from the backyard extension space.

Step 4: repeat the same on the opposite side. You might have to experiment a bit with where to put your
When you are finished, your design should look like the right one of these following couple of garden plots:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3261554004

(approx. 270 food units per year at maximum). This setup minimizes walking distances for vegetable gardeners while maximizing tillable space in the backyard garden:

The left one is our next design.

[Jabberwocky]

The Imperial Bender. Approx. 250 food units per year at maximum:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3261533356
Step 1: After building a road around 2x3 corpse pits, cut the space in half with a diagonal road.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3261533299
Step 2: Using the same technique as in the Bender, draw out your burgage plot as above.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3261533226
Step 3: If, for some reason, your efforts cannot reach the desired result, try this different approach for a little less efficient, but similar enough result (longer walking distances, but similar yields):

If everything went alright, your design should look like the left one of these two:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3261533137

The right one, the giant apple orchard, is our next design and only suitable for orchards!

The Sixpack: Up to 270 apples per year (level 3 housing recommended!)

As described above, maximize orchard space by starting with your first two burgage plot corner points leading into one corner of this design, then bring the third point around the bend, then put the fourth one on the last remaining corner:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3261533191

This will give you a ton of apple trees!

Here's a bonus food guide by Youtuber Tacticat:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSBBk4Qdwa4

[ALF]

Very interesting.
What size do you recommand for chicken and goat?

[Jabberwocky]

Originally posted by ALF:

Very interesting.
What size do you recommand for chicken and goat?

Chicken coops and goat sheds produce the same amount of goods no matter the backyard size, so....

Make them as small as possible. Chicken coops produce 1 unit of eggs per month, regardless of the number of families that lives on the plot. So I only build chicken coops in the backyards of single house plots, which just helps my planning, because I know that plots consume 1 food item per month per family. So 1 house plot with 1 chicken coop can be taken out of the equation because it is self-sufficient.

Goat sheds produce 1-2 hides per month, but hides are not necessary for food production, so it doesn't matter whether you build them in the backyard of a 1 house or 2 house plot. This might all change as soon as we get a butcher (some sources say that butchery will be implemented with the very next update, but I haven't seen any official info about that yet), but as of right now, the only reason to make backyards with goat sheds a bit bigger than the smallest possible size is that it looks a bit nicer.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3294558649
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3294558882
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3294559238

You can also use corpse pits instead of taverns as size reference, the backyards will be minimally larger, then. One does not HAVE TO use all these measurements and follow these guides to the letter, but I found that corpse pits and taverns with their ideal sizes for small burgage plots help me immensely when planning out my city:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3291152563

[Clovis Sangrail]

Great work. Have a cigar, or rather -- Take My Points.

Of course, great as these designs are, they don't do any good if the family living there is constantly busy because it's Unassigned and schlepping an ox on the far side of the town.

The families with vegetable gardens need time to plow up the garden, plant and harvest the vegetables, and they won't get that if they are constantly Unassigned and doing construction or assigned to a job that takes a lot of their time.

So rather than leaving them Unassigned, put them in a job that is pretty undemanding of their time. The Church is good, as is a Farmhouse, which is only busy for a couple or three months. Windmill works, too, because they can grind all winter and be ready to harvest veggies in the spring.

[sgt.greywar]

Great research but man... These are all things that need pretty serious dev attention.

Having some things require walking while other harvest through "magic" while still others yield fixed output regardless of labor or lot size etc?

That all needs fixing.

[Jabberwocky]

Originally posted by Clovis Sangrail:

Great work. Have a cigar, or rather -- Take My Points.
...

Thanks! As for leaving the families unassigned or assigned to corpse pits/churches and so on... the latter DOES help a bit, yes... but I've found that even if I don't care where anybody is assigned, having around 3-5 morgen of orchard and of vegetable gardens each will still comfortably produce large amounts of surplus in a 500+ population "Large Town" with level 3 housing only. It will just take a bit longer to reach maximum levels of efficiency. In the beginning of the game, one cannot afford to leave the small number of families one has in useless jobs anyway, so it's rather a strategy for fine-tuning and tweaking once one has a good surplus of workforce.

[Jabberwocky]

Originally posted by sgt.greywar:

Great research but man... These are all things that need pretty serious dev attention.

Having some things require walking while other harvest through "magic" while still others yield fixed output regardless of labor or lot size etc?

That all needs fixing.

I'd rather it doesn't get changed again, because it took long enough to figure all that out and learn to do it right. I'd much prefer having a tutorial campaign in the game that teaches every player how the game works.

[Clovis Sangrail]

Originally posted by Jabberwocky:

Originally posted by Clovis Sangrail:

Great work. Have a cigar, or rather -- Take My Points.
...

Thanks! As for leaving the families unassigned or assigned to corpse pits/churches and so on... the latter DOES help a bit, yes... but I've found that even if I don't care where anybody is assigned, having around 3-5 morgen of orchard and of vegetable gardens each will still comfortably produce large amounts of surplus in a 500+ population "Large Town" with level 3 housing only. It will just take a bit longer to reach maximum levels of efficiency. In the beginning of the game, one cannot afford to leave the small number of families one has in useless jobs anyway, so it's rather a strategy for fine-tuning and tweaking once one has a good surplus of workforce.

You are right about early game. I try to time my upgrades so that the veggie plots get new families first, then I to leave at least one family per plot Unassigned.

Then I temper my urge to go all-out on construction so they have some time to tend their gardens.

By the end of my first big grain harvest, I have enough population I can leave someone from the veggie plots in the farmhouse full-time.

[Clovis Sangrail]

Originally posted by sgt.greywar:

Great research but man... These are all things that need pretty serious dev attention.

Having some things require walking while other harvest through "magic" while still others yield fixed output regardless of labor or lot size etc?

That all needs fixing.

Nothing to fix. Jabberwocky figured it out; I figured it out; lots of people figured it out.

That's part of the challenge.

[ALF]

Originally posted by Jabberwocky:

Originally posted by ALF:

Very interesting.
What size do you recommand for chicken and goat?

Chicken coops and goat sheds produce the same amount of goods no matter the backyard size, so....

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3291152563

Thank you very much, you confirm my impression for I built huge chicken backyard without proben result

[Clovis Sangrail]

Originally posted by ALF:

Originally posted by Jabberwocky:

Chicken coops and goat sheds produce the same amount of goods no matter the backyard size, so....

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3291152563

Thank you very much, you confirm my impression for I built huge chicken backyard without proben result

You could change it to turnips.

[AJ]

very cool, you should turn this into a guide so more people will see it

[Jabberwocky]

Originally posted by Partisan:

very cool, you should turn this into a guide so more people will see it

How would I do that? I haven't figured out all the ins and outs of posting on steam forums yet.