Sheep farming in Manor Lords is one of the necessary stages in becoming a fully-fledged town, capable of significantly accelerating development, providing valuable raw materials, and fulfilling the clothing requirements of second-level residents. Read our guide to find out exactly how to start breeding sheep.
Unlike other types of livestock, sheep simply wander around your pastures, they don't need to be fed, they reproduce on their own from time to time and produce wool. To meet the city residents' clothing requirement, a lot of wool will be needed, meaning several large pastures and many, many sheep are necessary.
Starting off with such a task will be difficult, it's better to do everything slowly and in stages. After completing the initial deployment, select a location away from the city and areas suitable for planting crops. Then build a large pasture and a sheep farm house near it.
At this stage, there's no need to allocate residents, as you won't get sheep out of thin air — they can only be bought with the region's wealth. Each sheep costs 25-30 units of wealth, so a lot of money will be needed, and you can't do without selling marginal goods to neighboring regions. Therefore, first establish trade, and then think about sheep farming. Fortunately, you don't need to set up a trade route for importing livestock.
As soon as you have an extra hundred or two in the budget, build a livestock trading post. Open it, go to the «Trade» menu, set a quota for 8-10 sheep. Buy in pairs, as they don't reproduce unevenly. You can choose 20 sheep, as they won't import so many into the region at once, usually 2 sheep will arrive per month, and you also pay for them upon receipt. You'll have to assign one family to this post for the entire import period, otherwise, the livestock trading process won't start.
As soon as you get the first sheep, assign one family to the sheep farm house to look after them and collect wool. Let the wool accumulate in the warehouse for now — you'll have time to build a weaving workshop (best next to residential houses), and the accumulated wool in the warehouse will ensure its operation.
After completing the import, the process will become self-sustaining — the number of sheep will grow every month, as the game in early access did not take into account their age or death from diseases. Having imported 10 sheep, their number will increase to 50 and more within a year. Now you can assign three families to the sheep farm house and build a weaving workshop.
A couple of years later, you will be managing huge herds and can start exporting them to other regions. For this, open the livestock trading post, set a quota for 200 heads. Everything above this value will be sold. You won't earn much, but here you win by numbers. Keep in mind that one sheep farm house is efficiently managed with a hundred sheep, so don't forget to build new pastures over time. Also, we do not recommend occupying one corner of the map with pastures, it's better to place them in different corners and move them further from the city.