Cover-Credits:
Manor Lords is a brand-new medieval city-builder and real-time tactics-based game that was available to gamers on Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, and PC from 26th April. Despite the game being released in an early access state, it has achieved monumental success, selling over 1 million copies on launch day, and reaching the Steam charts for being the first city-builder with the highest concurrent players ever.
Considering that the game is available on Valve’s platform, many players are curious if it will run on the company’s Steam Deck handheld console. Thanks to Manor Lord’s relatively relaxed system requirements, we can be sure that the game can indeed be enjoyed on the Deck. Here’s how it performs along with the most optimized settings.
Running Manor Lords on Valve’s Steam Deck
As mentioned above, the Steam Deck certainly meets and even surpasses the system requirements needed to run Manor Lords on it. Moreover, it is also rated ‘Playable’ in the list of Steam Deck Verified games, which means it is officially recognized as a platform by developer Slavic Magic.
While it does offer satisfactory performance right out of the gate, it does require some amount of tweaking, as the game does not offer full controller support at the moment. While official support is expected to be announced soon, the current workaround is to use the trackpad and the touchscreen to navigate their way through Manor Lord’s UI.
Regardless of the game’s low requirements, there seem to be issues with optimizing the game for this hardware, which means getting the most out of the game demands you to tweak its settings for a more consistent gameplay experience. Here are the best settings for Manor Lord on the Steam Deck:
Display: Borderless Fullscreen
Resolution: 1280 x 800
Anti-aliasing: FSR on Quality
V-Sync: Off
Max Framerate: 30
Sharpening: Medium
Shader Quality: High
Shadow Quality: Medium
Postprocess Quality: Medium
Bounced Light Approximation: High
Volumetric Clouds: On
Terrain Texture Resolution: High
View Distance: High
Grass Density: High
Grass Distance: High
Foliage Quality: High
Running the game on the aforementioned settings will grant you a stable 30 FPS, which currently offers the right balance between performance and visual fidelity. However, you can also turn FSR to performance mode and set the Steam Deck’s FPS limit to 40 for a smoother gameplay experience. The game seems to be mostly GPU-bound, sitting at around 90% usage most of the time.
Considering the huge scale of the game and the features packed in will certainly offer an enticing tactics-based city-building experience for many gamers. Besides its top-down view, the game also has a walk-around mode, allowing you to transition to a character-level view and traverse through the city that you built. Despite its downfalls, Manor Lords is still a solid option on the Steam Deck.
