Manor Lords is a medieval building game that is currently topping the wishlist charts on Steam. As a Twitch streamer, Erik “Gronkh” Range had the opportunity to play it in advance – and was so unlucky that it could even help the developer.
What did Gronkh do? He recently tested Manor Lords in the stream: The medieval simulation from a single developer is currently the most wanted game on Steam. Although he seemed to be having fun, Gronkh ended his session abruptly when two of his oxen died in a fire.
As the streamer explains, the farm animals are the “bottleneck” of the game: without them you can’t go any further, you first have to get a new ox and that takes time again. He had already lost his only ox on a previous attempt.
Gronkh then received an email from the Austrian medieval expert and content creator “Copeylius”, who works as a historical consultant at Manor Lords. He read the answer in the next stream.
Manor Lord Release Date Trailer
More videos
Autoplay
Nobody has done this before Gronkh
What kind of response did Gronkh get? Copeylius tells Gronkh that his “ox problem” has been dealt with. The official diagnosis: bad luck. The Twitch streamer apparently lost his first cattle due to a previously unknown bug.
The error has not yet been reconstructed internally, explains Copeylius. It probably had something to do with the fact that Gronkh had placed a second tie bar even though he only had one ox. If you have more oxen than tie bars, a warning appears in the game that the animals are not properly housed – but the opposite case seems to cause problems.
However, Gronkh is granted the dubious honor of discovering a previously completely unknown problem twice: no alpha tester has ever managed to lose oxen in a fire, according to Copeylius.
“You managed to create two situations with oxen that we never had in thousands of hours of testing,” writes the historian and warmly congratulates Gronkh at this point. After all, you have to do it first.
You can see the corresponding stream excerpt here:
But Gronkh’s bad luck has one good thing: it’s precisely this kind of feedback that can help improve the game and make it ready for the upcoming early access from April 26, 2024. Copeylius would therefore like to thank Gronkh again on behalf of the developer.
The Twitch streamer plans to give Manor Lords another chance at some point – hopefully without any problems with stubborn ruminants.
Baldur’s Gate 3 also had strange bugs: The incredible scope of the role-playing game often resulted in extremely specific situations that the developers simply couldn’t have foreseen. One player found such a bug and ruined his save – others joked that the bug should actually be named after him.