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[Pink Photon]

I'm trying to set up a safe silk-collection scheme. I know that if I wall off a section of the cavern that has spiderwebs (and keep the cats out), then cave spiders will randomly spawn and renew the webs after I collect them. I can also capture spiders, tame them, and then release them into a room and they'll spin webs there.

My question is: where exactly will the spiders spawn? Will they only spawn in the pre-existing cavern tiles? If I dig out a space on a cavern level that doesn't have a path to the cavern itself, will they spawn there? Will they venture any distance to the levels above or below the caverns?

[kingubu]

I'm going to go out on a limb and say no one knows the answers to this in any detail.

But from my experience is using rat catchers instead of cats, I'd say they spawn anywhere.  I've caught creepy crawlers on the up/down stairs near my bedrooms.

Oddly enough the raws for creepy crawler say they have butchering returns, but there's no way to butcher them in game.  I have a butcher-anything script I'll try if I ever revisit rat catchers.

I will say that you should catch and tame the spiders then re-release them.  Otherwise they'll disappear.  I think.  Vermin are mysterious.

[LMeire]

I think they need a certain set of conditions to spawn, like biomes and maybe the presence of water. So maybe just try to replicate the cavern exactly? I've never tried to farm cave spiders, but once I got pond turtles to spawn on the floor directly above my cistern. Like kingubu said, it is a mystery.

[Laurin]

I found spider webs in corridors adjacent to caves. I tend to dig out some additional corridors if I happen to have webs in them somewhere. Sometimes I get more webs, sometimes not.
It's really hard to say whether there are any special conditions needed or what they might be.

[AutomataKittay]

I'm going to go out on a limb and say no one knows the answers to this in any detail.

But from my experience is using rat catchers instead of cats, I'd say they spawn anywhere.  I've caught creepy crawlers on the up/down stairs near my bedrooms.

Oddly enough the raws for creepy crawler say they have butchering returns, but there's no way to butcher them in game.  I have a butcher-anything script I'll try if I ever revisit rat catchers.

I will say that you should catch and tame the spiders then re-release them.  Otherwise they'll disappear.  I think.  Vermin are mysterious.

I asked about the creepy crawler a while ago and never got any answer about it's butchering return, I assume it's a bug or someone's mis-entry since vermins are too small to butcher, usually.

On subject of the spiders, I've seen some people in communal or succession fortresses manage to capture those vermin spiders and release them into a room. From comments I've seen, it makes them prefer to wander within a couple Z in similar area. I've no experience with it so I can't verify.

[Larix]

Tame cave spiders released into a room with solid walls will wander within this room. It may be necessary to make the walls two tiles wide: spiders do spawn into corridors separated from the caverns by one-tile walls, but my tame spider has spent over ten years in a single room bounded by two-wide walls.

Make sure no cats can get at the spider. Getting hold of the spider itself is also very much a question of luck - my legendary trapper has collected ~1500 misc. critters by now, but i still have to get a second spider.