Bay 12 Games Forum

We covered tiny taverns (which has been linked to the findings page in the OP) a good few pages back to investigate this, as you said and i put in my previous post, socialisation is not a activity, its just a idling state waiting around for performances.

Prayer is the same thing, but its idle state is meditation.

Sort of. If you look into the memory structure of the activity in dfhack when a unit is socializing or praying ("df.activity_entry.find(unit.social_activities[0])"), you can see that the respective initial events for those activities ("activity.events[0]") are activity_event_socializest and activity_event_worshipst; if that's the only non-dismissed event in the activity then the dwarf will show "Socialize" or "Worship" as their job. But a social activity can branch into a sub-event ("activity.events[1]") such as activity_event_performancest ("Listen to Poetry", "Tell Story", etc depending on event properties), and a worship activity can branch into activity_event_prayerst (which could be "Pray to X" or "Meditate", depending on "event.deity_id").

So "Socialize" is an activity, but you're right that it's only the baseline event of the activity which will generally branch into performing/watching/listening sub-events.

Wait, then, if I understood correctly, ¿temples have little or no effect unless you assign performers? I've got this bunch of people always grumpy because they can't pray, even having temples to each diety, but I thought they were just too pious and had no time enough to pray to each of the gods.

¿Or is it part of the whole "socialize" stuff?

You certainly don't need performers in temples to satisfy prayer needs, I've never assigned any and my dwarves (usually) pray just fine. It's possible having a performer would let dwarves also satisfy various kinds of social or artistic needs in a temple the way they otherwise will in a tavern, I'm not sure. But it's also possible that doing that would make it less likely for them to satisfy prayer in the temple, so it might be a net loss for needs satisfaction.

However, there are a few quirks with dwarves trying to pray which may cause the issues you're seeing. One of them is that any dwarf with sufficient military training will prioritize "Individual Combat Drill" over "Pray" in their idle time, so they will *never* pray to satisfy their need, no matter how devout they are; you'll have to remove their training barracks or remove them from their squad to get them to go pray. Another is that if a dwarf worships several gods and you have a dedicated temple to one of them, they may go there to pray and get stuck praying to that same god repeatedly because they won't know to leave that temple to go to a different temple to pray to their other god. In that case you can temporarily un-assign the temple they're stuck in and they should eventually go to another one to pray to their other god(s).

Both of those quirks can also be solved with a dfhack script that I'm working on, but I'd really like it to deal with the issue of dwarves failing to seek out friends/family to socialize with and I haven't figured out how to do that yet.

What if you added a pause and recenter to your script, see what they're doing when the need gets reset? If it turns out to be purely a proximity thing, maybe operating a pumpstack? If it turns out to require idle (or social activity) plus immediate proximity, maybe programmatically assign them to a burrow until the need is met?

That is part of my monitoring script, but friends/family needs seem to be satisfied so rarely that it's been hard to collect much data. So far I've only observed it to happen in two situations; the first was a child and father who got refreshes repeatedly while hanging out in the tavern (which led me down the Socialize route that ended up being a red herring), and the second was a husband and wife passing eachother in a hall while one was pathing in one direction to a stockpile job and the other was going in the other direction with no job, probably on their way to idle in the tavern.

In the second case though, because there was no shared social activity or job, I dug deeper into the unit structures at the moment the need refreshed and noticed that one of them had unit.unk_1d0[] referring to an activity with an activity_event_conversationst including only that single dwarf. I'm not sure what that means but I'm wondering if unk_1d0[] stores something like "idle chatter" activities and the entry literally represents the dwarf saying "hi" while passing in the hall. So that's one avenue I have to research more (which takes forever because it happens so seldom), although I've already tried replicating it manually with no success.

Yes, I think you're right that manually locking doors or assigning burrows will probably do the trick eventually. But that sounds pretty tedious, so my goal is to find a way to automate that process by using dfhack to detect dwarves with urgent BeWithFriends/Family needs and specifically induce them to seek eachother out, I just can't figure out what exactly to make them do that will satisfy those specific needs, since "Socialize" doesn't seem to be it.

the ones that might be relevant to social/break-related things being "TIME_SINCE_BREAK" and "ON_BREAK". In lua, these counters (and a lot more) can be found in the unit's status.misc_traits (provided they're active/whatever)

Hm, I can try those, although I'm not sure they're used any more in the current game version; in my fort of 112 citizens, not a single one has a misc_trait with id 16 (TimeSinceBreak) or 17 (OnBreak). Also, the problem I'm having isn't just with dwarves aborting my forced social activity for an actual job (teal text); they'll take a few steps pathing toward my activity and then stop and switch to a different idle activity (i.e. stop walking to the temple and instead go to Individual Combat Drill or to the library to read). That's why I was hoping to figure out the criteria for Purple! idle activities, to maybe get them to stick with what I assigned and not switch to something else.

The strength of a need can be modified in the unit's status.personality.current_soul.personality.needs, by changing its focus level. I know that a value of 400 is what it's set to when the need is met, and I believe that the value lowers as they get less focused, into the negatives. The numbers listed on the wiki are probably right for reference. You might be able to get dwarves having purple needs by just setting the focus value super low.

Yes, those are the focus level values that I'm scanning for dwarves with severely unmet needs (for example I had a military dwarf with -200000 PrayOrMedidate, which I think is the lower limit, because he would always drill in his idle time and never pray).

After some experimentation though, I'm pretty sure the Purple! indicator isn't really very meaningful. I just compared the need data for a bunch of dwarves currently engaged in purple "Socialize!"/"Pray!" and green "Socialize"/"Pray" activities, and the determining factor seems to be whether the dwarf has Socialize, PrayOrMedidate, BeCreative, Excitement or AdmireArt focus levels of -10000 or lower, but there was no link between the activity and the actual urgent need -- a dwarf with -10k Socialize and +10k PrayOrMedidate would still show "Pray!", a dwarf with -10k BeCreative and +10k everything else would still "Socialize!", etc.

A few assorted questions for Lua scripts:

edit: Nevermind, no longer relevant to what I'm working on.

Is there a way for a Lua script to tell if a female egglayer is currently busy sitting on eggs in a nestbox? "unit.job.currentjob" and "unit.actions" don't seem to show it. I can use dfhack.buildings.findAtTile(), :getType() and .claimed_by to check that the bird is standing on her own claimed nest box which is probably close enough, but I wondered if someone knows a more direct way to test for egg-sitting.

Is there any way with dfhack to forcibly cancel whatever job is associated with a specific item, and/or unflag that item as being part of a job?

Somehow I ended up with two minecarts floating in open space 1z above a ramp, flagged "TSK" so I can't get them moved or dumped somewhere else, but there is no job in the list that refers to them and forbidding/unforbidding doesn't un-TSK them.

edit: nevermind! I misunderstood what was going on; it was a couple of minecarts refusing to fall down into a space already containing other minecarts, and I didn't realize the lower ones would block the upper ones from falling, so the "TSK" actually indicated the item was "in flight". As soon as I bumped the upper ones sideways to interrupt their fall, the "TSK" went away and I was able to get them moved.

Is there a plugin or script, or could one be made, to alter the expanded furniture placement submenu (the one that shows each individual item available to place) so that the "Dist" could be toggled to show "Value" instead (or else "Value" added as a second column, the way the non-expanded list has both "Dist" and "Num")?

When furnishing noble rooms, the value of the item to be placed is much more relevant than the hauling distance. As it is I find I often have to keep going down the list hitting "v" to locate the particular items that I just had encrusted with the valuable gems, for example.