Sheep & Wool
The answer
Formula
2 wool per sheep, sheared once yearly in summer; ~20 sheep per pasture.
Sheep are the closest thing Manor Lords has to compounding interest. Buy in once, breed up, and the flock pays out in wool, meat, hides and resale more or less forever. This calculator sizes the yield and the land; the Beta changes below are the part that catches returning players.
The yield figures
Plan on two wool per sheep per year, sheared once in summer, and roughly 20 sheep per pasture. Shearing happens once. Wool arrives as an annual lump, not a monthly trickle. A tailor sized against the annual figure sits idle most of the year unless you buffer the wool.
The economics have been consistently strong: sheep cost about 30g to import and sell at around 20g at a price that stubbornly refuses to drop. Import around ten by year two and a flock reaches regional capacity, roughly 160–180 head, by year six. From there, breed to 120+ and sell down to 50–80 as recurring income, not a one-off.
One tariff trick: the 10g-per-head import tariff applies per region, so import only into your starting region and move sheep between your own regions afterwards.
Wool is worth more woven
Selling raw wool works, but it is the least profitable thing to do with it. One worker at a sheep farm produces 700+ wool a year, which becomes 700 clothing at the tailor. Enough to clothe a large share of your population from one staffed building. A wool shortage is almost never a sheep problem; it is a tailor-throughput problem.
The layout that fixes it: build a storehouse that accepts only wool and yarn, with the tailor next door. That keeps both out of the general storehouse queue so the tailor never waits behind unrelated goods for a cart.
What the Beta changed
Three things, and the first one kills flocks. Pasture animals now eat animal feed through every winter month or they die. Feed is made at the Livestock Farm from oats, where one oat becomes two feed, and consumption runs to roughly three feed per sheep and six per adult cow across the season. Plant the oats before you import animals, and cap feed production. Left unlimited, the livestock farm will convert your whole oat stockpile and leave your people with nothing.
Second, pastures now cost planks on a scale that grows with size, and the same effective capacity needs roughly 2.2× the area it used to. Budget both before expanding a herd.
Third, breeding runs on seasonal windows, not continuously. Historically several small pastures held far more animals than one large pasture of the same total area, with reports as high as 3×. At least one source says that subdivision advantage has since been patched out, and capacity now scales with total area regardless. Treat the 3× figure as pre-patch and re-test it in your own game.
Two habits still pay. Import adults, not lambs, since only grown sheep shear and breed. Butcher lambs, not adults: lambs give the same meat and hides without costing you a producer.
