This guide shows you how to set up a giant cave spider or forgotten beast as a silk farm in Dwarf Fortress.
Spider and Silk
Trading with caravans and storing enough silk aside in a modest stockpile behind a closed door for a peculiar mood will allow you to completely bypass the farm. You encounter a lot of these while traveling by caravan and even simply exploring caves.
So…. why to make this set-up? If you notice a lot of webbed corpses in the caves or unusually large amounts of silk, this is a great chance to get a lot of free silk. The dwarves’ desire to acquire objects can then be satisfied by making a variety of clothing out of silk, and you can then supply them with silk clothing on a regular basis. Now, the requirement for a Giant Cave Spider is the issue with this. the getting of it. Alternately, you may utilize a Forgotten beast that can be imprisoned and used as a spitter to accomplish this the difficult and one-time method.
You use the cave Spider for silk webs or the forgotten beast. Now once a forgotten beast is trapped, it cannot be let out. A spider can be caged in again in case you need maintenance.
Now there are many designs…
- Easy simple direct dwarf spitter farm. ( works just fine)
- A tamed spider that spits at threats.(I have not tested this, but considering what the spider thinks is a threat, it will spit).
- A forgotten beast that spits at anything it sees. (works fine).
- The small vermin cave spider farm.( I have yet to try this method in detail).
- Small farm.
- Big Farm.
- Bulk production automatic farm.
Now let us directly go to the designs to make this guide much compact.
Design and layouts
I will show the ideal representation:
Easy simple direct dwarf spitter farm
also applicable to :
A tamed spider that spits at threats
and
A forgotten beast that spits at anything it sees
How some advanced and little complex layout and design fundamentals. This layout is applicable and is from the forgotten beast guide, so don’t take it in depth, just that the details and all can be applicable as per the need:
Now the last line says, do not tame the spider, but honestly there is an alternative to that. That being you throw the bait in there as a hostile entity. That entity will trigger the spitter.
Now that the simpler designs are out of the way, we can move on to the more complex ones. Up until this point, we had assumed that the design was as simple as having a dwarf or other object stand in front of the spider, which would then spit until the bridge in front of it was raised. However, while that design works well for simple requirements, by dwarven standards, it seems incredibly primitive and barbaric.
Here would be a better design that can come under the categories of :
Small farm and Big Farm
Here is the design for Bulk Farm:
This is the set-up and a general layout of the Cave Spider Vermin Farm at the bottom part of the above page
How do you catch cave spiders in Dwarf Fortress?
The most secure way to deal with a big cave spider is to ambush it in a chokepoint (where your dwarves might be able to hit it before it webs all of them), fire bolts past defenses, or blast it while it is preoccupied fighting something else (like your unfortunate melee squad).
How do you gather spider silk in Dwarf Fortress?
A loom is used to weave fabric using silk thread that has been collected from the webs of brown recluse spiders, brown recluse spider men, cave spiders, enormous cave spiders, and phantom spiders (as well as any web-spinning forgotten creatures, titans, or clowns).
Credit to: Sniper(+)