Livestock, pastures and animal feed

Update 8 rebuilt Manor Lords livestock. Cows arrived, the sheep farm became the livestock farm, pastures got bigger and more expensive, and animals now go hungry in winter and die if you have no animal feed. Most livestock guides online predate all of that. This one is checked against version 0.8.104 (Update 8), with the 0.8.110 beta changes marked where they matter.

Two kinds of animals

Manor Lords has two separate livestock systems, and mixing them up is where most confusion starts.

• Pasture animals: sheep, lambs, cows and calves. They live on a pasture you draw, are bought through the livestock trading post, and are looked after by workers at the livestock farm. These are the ones that need animal feed in winter.
• Backyard animals: goats, pigs and chickens, kept in burgage plot extensions. The family on that plot looks after them. Since Update 5, goats give milk with chevon and hides every third cycle, and a chicken coop gives eggs with chicken meat every fourth cycle. Pigs give pork; Update 8 made them take 30% longer, offset by the pannage affinity, which speeds pigs up near woodland.

Getting sheep and cows

You import pasture animals at the livestock trading post (3 families on the wiki). Cows have been importable there since Update 8. Before you import, you need pasture space for them, and Update 8 changed pastures in three ways:

• Pastures need 2.2 times the area for the same pasture space.
• Their planks cost scales with their size.
• The livestock trader and the livestock farm no longer give free pasture space.

Herds grow by breeding. Since Update 8 breeding is seasonal and depends on herd size: cows breed in summer, sheep in autumn, and the young are born in spring. In the 0.8.110 beta, breeding becomes a single chance on the first day of the season, set at 40% for cows and sheep.

Winter feed: the part that kills herds

From Update 8, cows, calves, sheep and lambs get hungry in winter and eat animal feed every month, or die without it. Animal feed comes from oats: the livestock farm turns 1 oats into 2 animal feed, and its workers will walk outside their work area to fetch the oats.

The per-animal feed rate is in the in-game help page for pasture animals that Update 8 added; it has not been published in the patch notes, so it is not repeated here. The safe way to plan is to open that help page, multiply by your herd and by the three winter months (December to February), and halve the result to get oats, since every oat makes 2 feed.

Oats are a field crop added in Update 8. They share a fertility pool with barley, and the patch notes call them "much more resilient". Families can also eat oats directly, so a spare oat harvest is never wasted. If you also brew ale, remember barley and oats drain the same fertility. The field planner shows which crops share a pool.

What each animal gives

Animal	Product	When
Sheep	2 wool per shearing, chance of +1 from the herbage affinity	Once a year, summer
Cows	Milk	Monthly, not in winter
Cows, sheep (butchered)	Beef, mutton, hides	At the butcher; lambs and calves give half
Goats	Milk, chevon, hides	Every third cycle (Update 5)
Chickens	Eggs, chicken meat every fourth cycle	Backyard coop

Herbage is an Update 8 affinity: a chance of +1 extra yield for pasture animals, based on the meadow environment around the pasture.

Where the products go

Wool goes to the weaver's workshop, 1 wool to 1 yarn, then to a tailor for clothes. Hides go to the tannery and then the cobbler for shoes; see the production chains. Milk is a food on its own, or goes to the cheesemonger, an Update 8 workshop on level 3 plots that turns 1 milk and 1 salt into 2 cheese. Salt comes from a mining pit on a salt deposit, and since Update 5 a region starts with either iron or salt, so check your map before planning cheese.

The goods table lists every producer and consumer for each of these.

Beta 0.8.110 changes

If you play the beta branch: pasture animals produce dung (the base of the new fertilizer chain), pastures can accept or reject animal types in their advanced tab, sheep no longer die at high elevation in winter and instead give +1 wool there, and animals try to stay near the pasture shed in winter. New developments raise cow breeding by 15%, sheep breeding by 30%, pasture capacity by 20% and the livestock farm's feed efficiency by 20%.