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v0.34:Meeting hall
| This article is about an older version of DF. |
- Not to be confused with Meeting areas, a type of activity zone
Meeting halls are places in which idle dwarves and animals will congregate. They share their basic functions with meeting areas.
There are several ways to designate a meeting hall:
Rooms defined from a well are intrinsically meeting halls. You can also designate a dining room as meeting hall. Statue gardens and Zoos appear to serve all the functions of a meeting hall but are technically not called meeting halls.
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. Immigrants will collect at a meeting hall until their "migrant" status wears off.
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 overcrowded (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. Having dwarves socialize will often result in them becoming friends or forming a grudge.
Because almost every dwarf visits a meeting hall at least occasionally, it's an ideal place to site valuable objects and buildings that create happy thoughts in dwarves. A meeting hall exposed to sunlight will prevent dwarves from becoming cave-adapted.
Lastly, Dwarves tend to throw a lot of parties at meeting halls which can bring your fortress' economic endeavours to a grinding halt.