Is Manor Lords Steam Deck compatible? Performance isn’t the problem when it comes to getting the best out of Manor Lords on Steam Deck, even when the game is still in early access. A simple settings tweak will achieve an admirable frame rate, but the lack of controller support might be too much for some to overcome.
Tested on our Steam Deck OLED, a console we consider to be the best handheld gaming PC, Manor Lords proved a simple task on the graphical front. While this may seem obvious, we’ve had issues with city-builders in the past, so it’s no small feat to have the game running so smoothly on a portable device.
Is Manor Lords Steam Deck compatible?
Yes, Manor Lords is currently rated as playable according to Valve’s testing parameters. However, it comes with warnings over text size, controller functionality, and non-Steam Deck icons.
Overall, Manor Lords is a good game to play on Steam Deck in its current state. It’s far from perfect, but playable levels of performance requires very little tweaking. Controlling the game itself is okay, but full controller support would be nice in the future.
For now, you can control Manor Lords using the touchscreen and touchpads, with R2 operating as a right mouse button. The left thumbstick will also control the camera and there is some basic controller recognition in the game menus. It is a simple enough control scheme for a city builder, but if full controller support is a deal breaker for you, it may be best to wait for a future update.
We knew the performance was unlikely to be an issue after checking out the Manor Lords system requirements, but poor optimization can often let a game down, as it did in the case of Cities Skylines 2.
Best Steam Deck settings for Manor Lords
To get the best out of Manor Lords on Steam Deck, you’re going to want to drop the graphical fidelity of the game as this will get you a much more stable frame rate. The presets, when we tested the game, were set to ‘Ultra’, but dropping this to ‘Low’ and locking the max frame rate produced a steady 60 fps.
Here are the best Steam Deck settings for Manor Lords:
- Display Mode: Borderless fullscreen
- Resolution: 1280×800
- Anti-aliasing: AMD FSR
- FSR quality: Quality
- VSync: On
- Max Frame Rate: 60
- Sharpening: Off
- Shader Quality: Low
- Shadow Quality: Low
- Postprocess Quality: Medium
- Bounced Light Approximation: Medium
- Volumetric Clouds: Off
- Terrain Texture Resolution: Low
- View Distance: Low
- Grass Density: Low
- Grass Distance: Low
- Foliage Quality: Low
Switching on the Steam Deck’s built-in performance overlay, it’s shocking to see that with the above settings, Manor Lords pushes GPU usage to 99%, which explains the instability when trying to run the game on ‘Ultra’ settings.
The general power draw sits at 22W, and you can expect around 2 hours 15 minutes of playtime from a full charge. We have no concerns over the CPU or RAM usage of Manor Lords on Steam Deck, meaning if GPU usage can be lowered, there’s no reason why higher fidelity settings won’t eventually produce a more stable frame rate.
If you want to know our picks for the best Steam Deck games, we’ve assembled a select list from the over 14,000 playable or verified games.