One aspect of Manor Lords' successful launch that I wasn't quite expecting is the scientific detail in which the city-builder's players are approaching its farming systems. Perhaps no-one, however, has taken things as far as a player who's worked out how to maximize growing space by using some carefully arranged graves.
Over on the Manor Lords subreddit, one player discovered that you can make some truly massive vegetable or orchard extensions on your burgage plots. Traditionally, a big enough plot will split into multiple, smaller spaces, but this new method allows for plots that stretch to the size of a decent starter field - giving a huge amount of space for growing extra food.
The trick, apparently, is to use corpse pits - yes, the mass graves used to dispose of the bodies of fallen bandits - to line the edges of your desired plot. Measure things out just so, and you can get a garden around one morgen (the medieval unit of measurement that Manor Lords suggests is the optimal size for your first wheat fields) in size. A small amount of that space is given over to a house, of course, but the rest of it is yours to fill with vegetables.
You can make a perfect one morgen vege/apple plot measured with 4x corpse pits, but only if the edges are parallel to the edges of the map. from r/ManorLords
To add an extra layer of complexity to things, your corpse pits will have to line up exactly with the edges of the map. For some reason, if they're not parallel, you won't get these enormous veg patches. And to get the absolute most out of things, you'll want a double-house plot, upgraded to Tier 3 so that you can get a second family in each building.
Asked whether the huge plots simply waste too much of their owners' time, creator Meowbeep said that they eventually "put out a ton of food." As for the time tradeoff, the solution is to simply attach the citizens who live on these plots to lower-priority jobs so that they can give an appropriate amount of time over to their gardens without your whole settlement grinding to a halt.
Whether the corpse pits actually function as intended, I'm uncertain. There's a part of me that thinks I wouldn't love my garden fence to be a grave, but another part that thinks you'd get some excellent nutrients for your veg patch that way. If you're going to get the 3,000-strong villages that some players are carving out, however, it seems like this could be exactly the way to go.
The first major Manor Lords patch is on the way, and it's bad news for your villagers' drinking habits.
