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[roqi]

I have tried letting the fortress idle for a year with either a tiny tavern or a tiny non-location meeting area... Socializing in a tavern seems to never result in anybody talking to friends, just watching many performances. Leaving everybody job-less with just this tiny meeting area does end up in some "felt fondness talking with a friend", but since so many dwarves prefer to No Job in their own room, they remain miserable and lonely.

So, anybody figured out a way to force dwarves to talk to their friends/family? It's honestly frustrating me to no end.

[Shonai_Dweller]

Why not just meet their other needs? You don't have to cover ever need a dorf has to keep them from being distracted. Some needs are just hard right now because the features that would help meet them best aren't implemented yet.

[muldrake]

I have tried letting the fortress idle for a year with either a tiny tavern or a tiny non-location meeting area... Socializing in a tavern seems to never result in anybody talking to friends, just watching many performances. Leaving everybody job-less with just this tiny meeting area does end up in some "felt fondness talking with a friend", but since so many dwarves prefer to No Job in their own room, they remain miserable and lonely.

So, anybody figured out a way to force dwarves to talk to their friends/family? It's honestly frustrating me to no end.

I have an odd setup in a current fort, where just out of lack of convenient space, I ended up with a tavern in the middle of the barracks.  For no particular reason, I designated the dining room I usually put in that starting barracks as a tavern.  Entertainers almost immediately started showing up, and in the period before I moved the dwarves underground to their own individual quarters, something like half the fort was constantly socializing.  General happiness was pretty high.

[Ironfang]

I had a tarvern with a lot of traffic thanks to placing it in a magnetite vein with a lot of columns. It was so popular I had to ban guests from it and had to make the rest of the idle guests become Uristnauts.

[roqi]

Why not just meet their other needs? You don't have to cover ever need a dorf has to keep them from being distracted. Some needs are just hard right now because the features that would help meet them best aren't implemented yet.

I know, it just annoys me for roleplaying reasons, if you will. I have this tiny settlement -- everybody should know one another, and be either friends or grudges, and why the heck won't the parents even talk to their child? Plus, I want couples. Folks never talking = folks never hooking up, without micromanagey elaborate matchmaking that is.

I know it's a small thing, but it's frustrating, haha. Guess I'll have to wait for when it all gets fixed in a new version.

[Shonai_Dweller]

Why not just meet their other needs? You don't have to cover ever need a dorf has to keep them from being distracted. Some needs are just hard right now because the features that would help meet them best aren't implemented yet.

I know, it just annoys me for roleplaying reasons, if you will. I have this tiny settlement -- everybody should know one another, and be either friends or grudges, and why the heck won't the parents even talk to their child? Plus, I want couples. Folks never talking = folks never hooking up, without micromanagey elaborate matchmaking that is.

I know it's a small thing, but it's frustrating, haha. Guess I'll have to wait for when it all gets fixed in a new version.

Hmm. Is your tavern working? Apart from some of my deep miners and most of the military, everyone in my fortress seems to be socialising. Small population though due to a bunch of zombies outside who just won't go home.

I wonder if there's a link between serving booze and socializing? Risk of death by alcohol or brawl in exchange for people getting on. Hey, kind of like real life!

[mikekchar]

In another thread FantasticDorf (I think, apologies if I got it wrong!) mentioned a problem with lack of socialising and taverns.  They said that if you create a location by making a meeting area, then there are problems.  The key is to go back to the area (I) and make sure that "meeting area" and "active" are turned off.  It seems that there is some problem with overlapping the two.  Then I guess you make a meeting area somewhere else, so that dwarfs will socialise properly.  I apologise if I've gotten this wrong, because I was a bit confused about what the problem was and why this solution fixed it.

I tend to make my taverns by making a dining hall from a table, so I wonder if this is why I don't run into this problem.  Or maybe I *do* run into this problem and never noticed.  But I find that my dwarfs make friends fairly easily (in a few months or so) and even make friends with visitors, so I *think* things are working fine.  It's on my fairly huge list of things to experiment with... :-P

[Shonai_Dweller]

Hmm. Interesting. I thought there were problems caused by creating taverns from dining rooms. Guess not. I'm not sure what goes into socializing. Do you think a 'social atmosphere' might be calculated in their somewhere？ I've almost as many entertainers as dorfs right now.

The only fellas completely ignoring the festivities in my fortress are a pair of minotaurs (a poet and a swordsman) who are hanging out near the bedrooms for reasons unknown (new entity - short lived, city dwelling expansionists. War with pretty much everyone).

The swordsman trashed the trade depot on the way in, so I imagine their antisocial behavior is due to my keeping them as Building_destroyers. They're acting pretty much like the tame trolls who turn up from time to time. I guess they're so conflicted about whether to smash some doors or not they don't have time to party.

Annoying. I'd prefer social visiting minotaurs and building wrecking invaders, but I guess I'll have to compromise.

[Ironfang]

If you have a lot of entertainers, your dwarves might be meeting with them. They are neither friend or family. If they are chatting with a bard during their break, they can't have proper family time.

[Shonai_Dweller]

If you have a lot of entertainers, your dwarves might be meeting with them. They are neither friend or family. If they are chatting with a bard during their break, they can't have proper family time.

A dwarf can't make friends with a visitor?

[Ironfang]

If you have a lot of entertainers, your dwarves might be meeting with them. They are neither friend or family. If they are chatting with a bard during their break, they can't have proper family time.

A dwarf can't make friends with a visitor?

They might be able to, but they won't be friends immediately.

[PatrikLundell]

One of the problems with the relations logic is that dorfs tend to get visitors and traders on their relations lists, but not their fellow dorfs, even if they were born in a small fortress.

[mikekchar]

Ah... Maybe that's what was meant in the other thread.  If you have a tavern, then your dwarfs will socialise with visitors, but not with each other.  So if you can somehow up the popularity of other meeting halls, then they will have the opportunity to socialise with locals -- because visitors won't go there.

[PatrikLundell]

No, unfortunately not to any significant extent. They won't recognize each other even if there are no visitors at all. It doesn't seem that visitors steal socializations slots or socialization points to a major extent, but rather that they just don't get started. As a completely unfounded speculation, you might get something like the current behavior if you have some kind of trigger repeat block meant to ensure everyone won't get buddies immediately, but instead of saying you can't make a socialization point acquisition roll more often than X ticks after the last one, but instead happened to implement it to check that time since the last time they met. (Such a bug could probably be checked by burrowing the fortress in two sections and let them out to socialize with the "forbidden" side one month per year).
It doesn't help that there's no knowledge I'm aware of of how the initial relations acquisition works: I've seen no description of any scheme that seems to help or promote the initial getting to recognize the beard of another dorf:
- Urist McFreshAdult: That dorf over there looks suspicious: do you think she's a goblin spy?
- Urist McFather: No. She's the armor smith. She's been living in the room next to you for your whole life, and is one of the founders of the fortress.
- Urist McFreshAdult: But I don't recognize her!
- Urist McFather: You're a dorf. It's perfectly normal.
- Urist McFreshAdult: But I know who PointyEars the merchant whom I met once 10 years ago is?
- Urist McFather: It's perfectly normal. You're a dorf.

[mikekchar]

But I don't understand.  I just started a new embark.  I have my starting 7 (who were friends originally) and I also have 7 more who have joined.  It's 6 months in.  No tavern.  I have 1 immigrant who is not on friendly terms with anyone, but who is married.  I have another immigrant who is on friendly terms with every single dwarf in the fortress *and* the outpost liason.  Other people are in between.

I have another fortress which is a couple of years in I guess (6 migration waves).  A tavern, temple and library were build almost immediately.  In this one, I started with only peasants in the starting 7.  I don't know if that was the reason but they didn't start out as friends.  2 of them actually started with a grudge.  But now all of the starting 7 have at least a few friends and everybody has varying degrees of familiarity down the line.

So... I'm not sure if what I'm observing is broken or not.  I just take it to be slightly understand.  So "friend" means "best friends for life", "friendly terms" means "people at work who I get along with", "passing acquaintances" means "people I see every day and chat with".  Nothing doesn't mean I don't know them -- it just means that I don't go out of my way to talk to them.  Some dwarfs are more friendly than others.  There are some who have 15-20 people on their list.  Sure, not facebook level, but pretty gregarious in my book.  And then there are some miserable souls who hardly care about anyone.  But that seems reasonable to me.

I wonder if I just have a lower level of expectation, or if other people are seeing something other than what I am.