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[fractalman]

I have tried...everything I can think of.  Huge dining halls.  no dining halls whatsoever. Overlapping multiple dining designations.  no dining designations.  multiple dining halls, not-overlapping. I once thought I'd found the solution by having 5 overlapping, 5 seperate, and then 20 some chairs that weren't part of a dining hall...but no, that doesn't quite work.

Each table touches exactly one chair, period, so it's not that issue. 

But, no matter what I do, it seems that at least 10 % of my dwarves, sooner or later, complain about a lack of chairs.
What gives?

I am willing to stick a table and chair pair into every single dwarven bedroom.  or even 1 table and two chairs. 
I am willing to put 4 tables per chair.  I am willing to install gold chairs/tables on the surface if that's what it takes. 
just.
I am willing to stop giving my nobles their own dining halls if that's what it takes.  (aka, are noble dining halls being checked by dwarves who say 'ah, but i'm not permitted to use any of these chairs, therefore not enough chairs')


So: how do I stop these complaints ONCE AND FOR ALL!

[Laurin]

I think that occurs sometimes if a dwarf is very hungry and eats just at the stockpile only to complain about lacking chairs later ...

[fractalman]

Well...it's not like I ever have a food shortage...
Guess I could make extra sure to stockpile all edibles between the dining rows.  It'll bite into my smelting efficiency (yes, smelting efficiency is what will take the hit, long story...)
Testing will take time....any other ideas untill then?

[Remuthra]

Stockpile your food on chairs?

[Larix]

Put an extra dining hall and food/drink stockpiles near your smelters. Dwarfs take "eat" as a job, either from idling or, if they've been busy smelting, after finishing a workshop job; they'll then first locate a piece of food that's close to them the moment they decide to go eat, and once they've found food, they'll go looking for a chair.
Offering dining accomodations (and if necessary a makeshift crash space) near their workshops cuts down quite a lot on unproductive cross-fortress travel on self-maintenance jobs.

Do you have enough commonly available chairs? "Lack of chairs" usually comes up when there are either too few chairs around (a rare occurrence, one chair-with-table for five dwarfs should be comfortably enough, but more don't hurt) or some dwarfs can't find a legal chair to sit on because all other chairs already belong to somebody, i.e. are assigned to personal dining rooms or offices. This _usually_ doesn't happen by accident, since dwarfs won't claim unassigned dining rooms like they claim unassigned bedrooms.

But if a chair/table is _in_ a room that's an individual dwarf's property, it becomes unavailable to anybody else. If, say, you paint a huge personal bedroom from a stray bed in the middle of the dining hall, the owner of the bed will now be the proud owner of all those chairs and tables and no-one else will dare eat there. At least that's what i remember, haven't fallen in that trap for quite a while now.

[Garath]

don't worry so much about it. As long as every table has a chair, the problem simply turns to pure dorf stupidity, comparable to a dorf deciding to sleep on the floor because his bedroom is too far (at least 10 steps, you know, too far) and then complaining about the lack of bedrooms. Just make your regular dining hall and leave it at that.

[fractalman]

-I actually don't have the issue with dwarves not going to their luxurious "personal" bedroom.  The forge workers happily climb 100 z-levels to the exploity bedrooms untill I feel like tracking their bed down and assigning them a new one near the forges. So, no, I can't chalk it up to "typical" dwarven stupidity...it seems very specific to the algorithm for finding an available dining location. If it works the way I think it does, then I'll need to switch to one dining hall for the entire fort, including the forge-workers..

...maybe if I assigned a private dining hall to every dwarf in the fort? I really don't want to do that if it's not going to work..

[Garath]

I was trying to get my mayor to finish a meeting and he decided to sleep in the dormitory instead of his very nice rooms and on the floor. He even travelled down about 35 levels, passing his own (2, havn't unassigned the regular ones he claimed when he was not yet mayor) bedrooms. If he can do that, I am able to believe that some dwarfs, despite having the choice of several dining halls, a personal dining hall or anything like that, can still eat standing somewhere and then complain about it.

[Sutremaine]

I have a theory that if a dwarf's bed's tile is occupied at one crucial moment, they'll abandon the idea and go sleep somewhere else instead.

[Larix]

There may be something about what Sutremaine says - my experience with honeymoon suites (a.k.a. forced socialising boxes to get dwarfs married) says that a dwarf will not sleep in their own bed if someone _stands on top of it_ (they may still sleep in it if someone _lies_ in the bed). They also will not sleep in someone else's personal bed (apart from that of a spouse, or if the dwarf in question is a child, their parents'), which leads to a dwarf in a room with two beds in it sleeping on the floor because the other dwarf in the room was standing on their bed.
A similar pathing exclusion may be in place for chairs - if some unit stands on a chair's tile, a dwarf may refuse to sit down on that chair. This can easily become a problem with very compact dining rooms which double as main meeting hall - there'll be a bunch of idlers, partyers and non-pastured animals clogging up the place, occupying most tiles. The solution would not be the one big meeting hall but rather multiple communal mess halls, most of which aren't meeting places.

[fractalman]

Hm...so if I have dwarves standing on about 10% of my chairs, I can expect to see roughly 10% of dwarves complaining?
that...
That actually sounds like about the right ratio.

[Sutremaine]

The solution would not be the one big meeting hall but rather multiple communal mess halls, most of which aren't meeting places.

You can still have a big dining room / meeting zone, but you'd have to cut holes in the meeting zone to give the tables and chairs space. Setting low traffic designations over the chairs and tables will help keep dwarves at least from standing over them on their way somewhere else.