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[mwoody450]

Does anyone know the functional difference between a dining room and a meeting hall?  Is a meeting hall just a central dining area?  The only difference I can tell is that when I set the meeting hall bit on, all my mules and cows fill the room for some bizarre reason.

[Align]

I've noticed dwarves going places they usually don't bother with when it's set as a Meeting area and they either have no job or are on a break. So if you put it in your dining rooms they might get a bit cluttered.

[Hypcso]

Meeting hall is where your dwarves will go when they have no other jobs, or are on break. Incidently, if there are many dwarves there they will chat and make friends which also greatly increases their mood.

[Morlark]

Mmm, a meeting hall is where your dwarves will go when they have no job, or when they're on a break. A dining room is where your dwarves will go to eat food, and if you don't have one then they'll start having negative thoughts complaining about the lack of tables and chairs.

[Quintin Stone]

Meeting halls are also where dwarves throw parties.  No meeting halls, no parties.  I had a particularly happy fortress where nothing got done because the dwarves were constantly attending parties.  It got so bad management had to step in and undesignate every meeting hall.  That got those ecstatic dwarves back to work.

[Name Lips]

Note that in the new version you can "designate" an area as a "Meeting area" without any furniture to assign it to at all. You can designate any area, inside or outside. Use the "i" tool.

This is the best way to get dwarves and animals indoors when starting out on a new, hostile map.

And the best part is that they don't waste time throwing parties in these zones.

[aeroue]

quote:Originally posted by Quintin Stone:
<STRONG>Meeting halls are also where dwarves throw parties.  No meeting halls, no parties.  I had a particularly happy fortress where nothing got done because the dwarves were constantly attending parties.  It got so bad management had to step in and undesignate every meeting hall.  That got those ecstatic dwarves back to work.</STRONG>

Zoos as well

[mwoody450]

Alright, thanks guys.  I guess I was just thrown off by how similar the processes are for declaring a meeting hall and dining hall; it led me to believe a meeting hall was some strange subset of a dining hall.

It's still strange to me how all my cows flock to a meeting hall, though.  Forced to guess, I'd say the code for collecting in a meeting hall applies to animals as well, and since they never have a job they spend all their time there.  I built a cage next to my butcher and shoved 'em all in there to... wait.

[Align]

So they're not just following their owners around?