After spending time trying to fix a bug that wasn't actually there, Manor Lords dev has a simple request for players: 'Have fun with mods but please don't report bugs if you use them'
Mods are great, except when they're not.
Manor Lords does not yet have official mod support, but that hasn't stopped industrious modders from doing their thing with it. A VR mod popped up at the beginning of May, and last week someone put Shrek into the game. Which is all well and good, and developer Slavic Magic seems very supportive of the efforts overall. But he does have one request: If you're using a Manor Lords mod, please don't submit Manor Lords bug reports.
Mods can open the door to all sorts of new and unexpected content and experiences in whatever game you happen to be playing at the moment, but they can also be a gateway to headaches. For one thing, updates to games can cause mods to stop working, as we saw most recently with the (not so) big Fallout 4 "next gen" update, which thoroughly borked mod support and modded saves out of the gate. In the case of Manor Lords, it seems the reverse was true: A mod led to a report that led to time spent searching for a bug that wasn't actually there.
"Feel free to experiment and have fun with mods but please don't report bugs if you use them," Slavic Magic tweeted. "I spent time today checking a 'missing granary model' bug only to learn that it's caused by a 'storage plus' mod."
Generally speaking, disabling mods is the first thing you want to do when troubleshooting technical issues with a game: You want to be sure you're pointing the finger of blame in the right direction, after all. In the case of a game like Manor Lords, it's especially important because it's largely the work of one guy, the aforementioned Slavic Magic—or Greg Styczeń, as he's known in the offline world—and time spent trying to track down bugs that aren't really there is time that's not being put to use continuing the development of the game.
That situation isn't likely to change: In response to one follower on Twitter who suggested he take a cue from Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Persson and hire more devs to help with the game, he wrote, "Fun fact, hiring and management is a difficult and time consuming job which can as easily destroy a work-life balance that I have."
Official mod support for Manor Lords is hopefully on the way: Slavic Magic said in 2021 that "it will come later," and more recently publisher Hooded Horse said in an FAQ on Reddit that "mod support is under consideration for implementation post-launch, potentially after the full 1.0 release."
That could be quite a long time down the road: Manor Lords launched into early access in April and the Steam page says it's expected to stay in that state for about a year, although "that might change depending on how the design develops with player feedback." In the meantime, there's quite a bit of interesting stuff already available on Nexus Mods, but remember: Disable first, then submit.