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[Zomg]

So, anyone with a few fortresses played knows about the "smoke break" behavior, where dwarves without an active task will sometimes walk outside and loiter at the point your initial wagons originally appeared.

It seems almost impossible to stop the behavior, even with multiple statues, zoos, and meeting halls, without actually shutting up all the exits (and thus screwing up naturally outdoor industries like hunting and wood cutting). This can really hinder a fortress designed to be very deep in the mountain, since dwarves will drift away from your labor center compulsively. It also seems to make it so that off duty soldiers rarely spar. Also also there's comedy vomiting because cave adapted dwarves still can't help but run to that wagon rally point occasionally. Also^3 it makes it so that you can't position your fortress very far north or south of your initial position without creating a very long and wasteful hike back to the wagon point for off duty dwarves.

Are there any known ways to truly shut down smoke breaks?

[puke]

i dont think so, at least not permanently.  i have two huge (360 squares, about) royal dining rooms / meeting halls.  four statue gardens, that are even larger.  four dedicated meeting-halls (non dining) that are the same size as the statue gardens.  and wells sprinkled all over the place.

i get very few dwarfs wandering outside... but they still do it every now and again.  i cant lock my doors without causing problems, but i do often tell them to "stay indoors" unless there is something i need them to pickup or harvest out there.

i think what will fix this, is when Toady implements the "buroughs" feature which limits dwarfs to a section of the cave.

[Heliopios]

My off-duty dwarves stay in their rooms, or wander about the hallways until the next job roll.

[schnobs]

This probably won't help you, but it's somewhat on topic:

In one of my fortresses, I didn't strike the cave river as such, but a waterfall. I decided to keep digging in a straight line, ending up with a bridge across the waterfall and another just a few tiles deeper in the mountain that crossed the actual river.

Now, the interesting thing was that obviously, a waterfall is an attractive meeting place. More attractive than any statue garden, zoo or whatnot.

In my next and current fortress, I have found no waterfall at all, so I couldn't explore this further. But if memory serves, I've never noticed dwarves actually going to a waterfall I exposed while designing treefarms or mining for limestone. But in this particular case, where the main corridor lead right across a waterfall, most dwarves on break wouldn't go all the way to the entrance but stop at the waterfall. A few still went outdoors, of course, but fewer than I've ever experienced in any other fortress.

Now one might complain that it's not much of a difference wether dwarves go all the way or stop a few tiles short of the entrance. But althouh the waterfall was close to the gates, it still was about 1/3rd of the way to the chasm.

[Fieari]

That's odd.  My dwarves always go to my statue garden for breaks.  Maybe the value of the garden matters?

Perhaps the "Dwarves stay inside" order also matters?