[Gateway] Easily distinguish GUILD_CREATE events

[Skillz4Killz]

Hello 👋

Is there any technical reason why a property on GUILD_CREATE event can not be added to help determine the type of GUILD_CREATE event. These events are emitted in various different circumstances.

1. A guild was added
2. Shard resumed
3. Unavailable guild became available
4. Initial loading when connecting to discord
5. Insert anything i didnt think of here etc...

I am hoping a property could be added that we can then use to determine how to handle it without having to cache/store millions of guild ids.

If there is an alternative method, that could solve this as well from your side i would be totally open to that as well. For example, separate events for each.

Use Case:

I try to support standalone gateway processes and the events are simply passed on to a event handler process so if the event handler restarts it loses that cache of ready event guildIds. My goal is to make it not rely on cache/storage as much as possible. At the moment, this just isn't possible and it is necessary to cache all this. Discord has been pushing for more stateless bots so this would go a long way in helping as well.

Thank you 🙏

[FasterSpeeding]

The unavailable field already lets you distinguish between GUILD_CREATEs where the guild is becoming available (so after outages and on start-up) and where the bot was added to a guild.
Under current behaviour this field will be false if it was previously unavailable and not present in the payload if the bot is being added to the guild.

[Skillz4Killz]

Yep, I am basically hoping to expand this. Example: If it is not present in the payload how do you differentiate between 1, 2, 4 without using cache/storage.

[Mehgugs]

you don't, to quote the gateway docs:

Discord expects clients to locally cache as many relevant object states as possible

[Skillz4Killz]

@Mehgugs I think that is being taken out of context quite heavily. Not asking about making excessive calls here but a bit of clarification on events meaning.

To avoid excessive API calls, Discord expects clients to locally cache

Most of a client's state is provided during the initial Ready event and the Guild Create events that immediately follow. As objects are further created/updated/deleted, other events are sent to notify the client of these changes and to provide the new or updated data. To avoid excessive API calls, Discord expects clients to locally cache as many relevant object states as possible, and to update them as gateway events are received.

I understand that atm it is not possible and I simply don't have a way of doing this and it requires caching this info, that is why I made this discussion. To discuss with devs, if it is possible to improve this and if so great if not well we stick to what we got.