Lab Wall

The Great Hall is the upgraded dining room tier above the Mess Hall. It is the room type that Duplicants can receive a significant morale bonus from, and it becomes available once the room meets the stricter space, furnishing, and decoration requirements. Unlike the Mess Hall, the Great Hall is not granted just by placing a mess table; Duplicants must actually eat their meals inside the room to receive the bonus.

To qualify as a Great Hall, a room must contain at least one Mess Table, have no Industrial Machinery, be between 32 and 120 tiles in size, include at least one decor item with 20+ decor, and contain a recreational building. A room meeting these conditions grants a +6 Morale Bonus. This bonus is obtained only when Duplicants eat in the Great Hall, and it is mutually exclusive with the Mess Hall bonus.

The decoration and recreation requirements are relatively easy to satisfy early on. A Bluff Briar can fulfill the decor requirement even without an Artist Duplicant, and a Water Cooler can satisfy the recreational building requirement. Because of this, a Great Hall can often be set up much earlier than players expect, especially if a colony already has a tidy dining area and a few spare decor items.

• If you want Duplicants to use the room only for meals, disable the Water Cooler and provide recreation elsewhere.
• A Recreation Room can be converted into a Great Hall simply by placing an unused Mess Table inside it.
• The morale bonus depends on where Duplicants eat, not on where they spend downtime, so leisure time in the room does not count.
• Compact layouts near the Printing Pod can also be used to meet the room requirements, as long as the Duplicants are actually eating in the completed room.

In practice, the Great Hall is one of the most efficient early morale upgrades in the game. A well-placed dining room can support colony growth for a long time, especially when combined with other basic morale sources. Since the buff is tied to meal consumption, the key design goal is not merely to satisfy the room definition, but to ensure that the room is the place where meals are routinely eaten.