v0.34:Meeting hall

Meeting halls are places in which idle dwarves and animals will congregate, presumably identical to meeting areas. Immigrants will collect at a meeting hall until their "migrant" status wears off.

There are several ways to designate a meeting hall:

Statue gardens and zoos are intrinsically meeting halls, as are rooms defined from a well. You can also designate a dining room as meeting hall.

Note that the wagon you arrive with constitutes a meeting hall until you designate the first meeting hall or area of your own. If you start in hostile surroundings it is important to get your dwarves and animals out of danger quickly.

It is a good idea to have at least one meeting hall of one form or another: It allows you to make off-duty dwarves and animals gather in a place where they are not vulnerable, such as within the fortress. It is however not advisable to have animals mill around in crowded (read: any) meeting halls for a prolonged time as they will pick fights with dwarves and other animals. While this may be negligible in the case of a hen, it also applies to your war dogs e.g.

A meeting hall filled with dwarves increases their social skills; It makes idle dwarves a little less idle.

Because almost every dwarf visits a meeting hall at least occasionally, it's an ideal place to site valuable objects and buildings.

A meeting hall exposed to sunlight will prevent dwarves from becoming cave-adapted.

Having dwarves socialize will often result in them becoming friends or forming a grudge.

Lastly, Dwarves tend to throw a lot of parties at meeting halls which can bring your fortress' economic endeavours to a grinding halt.