SOCIAL DINING
Ever wanted your colonists to actually share meals together at assigned seats? With this mod they do — pawns get automatic or manual dining seat assignments and a rich mood system rewards (or punishes) the social dynamics at the table.
Feedback and bug reports are welcome — details below.
What This Mod Does
Seat Assignment
- Automatic seat assignment — when a colonist is assigned a bed the mod finds the nearest free dining chair adjacent to a table and assigns it automatically. A BFS-based search prefers table-adjacent chairs; a radial fallback ensures coverage.
- Manual seat assignment — every sittable chair (non-bed) adjacent to a table gets a vanilla-style owner overlay. Click a chair to assign or unassign a colonist manually. Manual assignments always take priority over automatic ones.
- Room context menu — right-clicking on empty floor in a dining room or rec room (nothing selected) opens a float menu to auto-assign all free seats in that room or clear all assignments at once.
- Multi-seat chair support — sofas and benches with more than one seat slot can hold multiple assigned owners (one per slot). If full, the incoming assignment swaps out the first current owner. A colonist can only own one seat globally.
- Seat memory — chair-to-pawn assignments persist across save/load. If a chair loses its assignment (e.g. after a mod update) the remembered owner is silently restored on the next load.
- Owner overlay on chairs — assigned chairs display the owner's name matching the style used by beds.
- Retry logic — if a dining room or seat isn't ready when a bed is assigned (e.g. room roles not yet calculated) the mod retries a few times over the next seconds.
Dining Thoughts
A layered mood system evaluates who you eat with, where, and what. Thoughts fire when a pawn finishes a meal and cover six independent groups:
- Lone Eating — eating alone brings a penalty (Lonely Meal −4) unless the pawn is a Loner (Quiet Meal +2).
- Social Base — scales from a simple Shared Meal (+2) up through Friends Dinner (+4), Inspiring Meal (+5), Family Dinner (+5), to Romantic Dinner (+6). Best match wins.
- Special Social — when no personal connection is present: Veteran Stories, Table Leader, Deep Conversation, or Teaching at Table (Biotech DLC) can still add +2.
- Negative Social — conflicts at the table fire the worst applicable penalty: Silent Meal (−1) up to Rival Meal (−6).
- Environment — room impressiveness, cleanliness, and crowding each fire independently (+3 / −1 / −3).
- Favorite Seat — eating in the pawn's own assigned chair adds +2.
Thoughts tied to a specific companion show that pawn's name in the mood tooltip — "stories from Ana", "inspired by Bob", "ate across from Chuck". Full thought list in the README.
Drinking Thoughts
A parallel mood system fires when a pawn finishes a social drug (beer, ambrosia, psychite tea, …). Hard drugs and medicine are unaffected. Uses the same table-based companion detection as dining.
Alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks are distinguished — drinking alone hits harder with alcohol, while teas and ambrosia encourage quiet reflection. The same six groups apply:
- Alone Drinking — Drink Alone (−3, alcoholic) / Mindful Drink (+1, non-alcoholic) / Solitary Drink (+2, Loner).
- Social Base — Shared Drink (+2) up to Romantic Nightcap (+5).
- Special Social — Happy Hour, Drunk Bonding, Drinking with Idol, Drink Talk, Bar Stories, Life of the Party (several can stack).
- Negative Social — Annoying Bar Mate (−3) to Tense Bar (−5).
- Environment — Nice Atmosphere (+3), Squalid Drink (−1).
- Favorite Seat — reuses the +2 dining thought.
Mod Settings
- Enable / disable automatic seat assignment
- Prefer bedroom-adjacent seats first
- Always show chair owner names
- Enable / disable dining thoughts
- Enable / disable drinking thoughts
Requirements
- Harmony — required. Must be loaded before this mod.
Compatibility
- RimWorld 1.6
- Safe to add mid-game — seat assignments begin on the next bed assignment event; existing chairs get comps automatically
- Safe to remove — RimWorld silently ignores unknown comp data and missing ThoughtDefs on load
- No special load order required as long as it's after Harmony, Core and DLCs
- Usable without any DLC (Ideology, Biotech, Anomaly, Odyssey, Royalty)
- Multiplayer not explicitly tested
DLC Support
- Biotech DLC — Teaching at Table thought fires when adults dine with children
- Ideology / Royalty / Anomaly / Odyssey — no DLC-specific behavior; fully playable without any DLC
Optional Mod Support
- Get Out of My Chair (Aelanna) — full bidirectional sync: SD assignments set the chair to Private in GOOMC; GOOMC private chairs are respected during auto-assignment. Reflection-based, no hard dependency.
- Other furniture mods — works automatically for any sittable non-bed building adjacent to a table
All optional mods are detected at runtime via reflection — no hard dependency, no additional load-order requirement.
Supported Languages
- English
- German
Additional languages can be added upon request.
If you would like to help with translation, feel free to contact me.
Feedback & Bug Reports
If you encounter issues, please provide:
- A short description and what you expected to happen
- Steps to reproduce (if available)
- Player.log or Hugslib log
You can use the Steam Workshop comments or discussion section.
Licensing & Legal
Copyright © 2026 b4ttl3m3d
All rights reserved.
Restrictions
You are NOT allowed to:
- Reupload this mod or any modified version of it to Steam Workshop or any other platform.
- Include this mod in mod packs or redistributions without explicit permission.
- Sell this mod or use it for any commercial purposes.
Permission
If you want to reuse parts of this mod or include it in a project, please contact the author for permission.
Legal Notice
This is a fan-made project and is not affiliated with Ludeon Studios.
Please review the RimWorld EULA before use:
RimWorld End User License Agreement
Support & Donations
If you would like to support the project:
Ko-fi[ko-fi.com]
Donations are completely voluntary and do not grant access to additional content or features.
They are simply a way to support ongoing free development.
