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[ThePeanutMonster]

Picked up this game again after a couple of years. Still very new and learning as I go.

Ok, so dug deep-"ish" in search of metals. Next minute I've opened an enormous cavern up in my stairwell. Spiders all over. It's about 10 z levels from main fort. Am I doomed?! What do I do now? I have military or traps in play - and no weapons to speak of (!)

[GoblinCookie]

Seal it off with a drawbridge as soon as possible.  Only allow your dwarves to enter the cavern when you have squads stationed in the cavern.

[PatrikLundell]

You're probably not doomed, unless you're very unlucky or don't do anything about it. The spiders you see are probably cave spiders, NOT Giant Cave Spiders (GCS) the former are mostly harmless (occasionally they can bite dorfs resulting in a permanent sluggishness syndrome).

The first step is to build an Up stair at the lowest boulder in your staircase to block off the cavern (not having to move a boulder saves time, but it's probably not critical).
The next step is to plan your proper entry to the cavern, which differs based on play style. I use a cautious/cowardly style, which means I build an airlock by a flat section of the cavern, i.e. a tunnel that's one tile away from breaching into the cavern with a raising drawbridge in each end. I then place 3 cage traps just behind the bridge at the cavern end, 3 empty tiles [future expansion for repeating spike trap array against FBs], and then a wooden door (a wooden door attracts all kinds of building destroyers, luring them into the cage traps, and can also be locked to slow down/stop hordes of cavern creatures (crundles can come in groups something like 15 strong [but I don't think they appear in the first cavern]).
When the airlock has been built and the bridges hooked up to levers and tested (to see they weren't accidentally built as retracting) I wait for a suitable moment to breach the cavern. A suitable moment is when I see some kind of cavern critter that's reasonably benign (Elk Birds, Gorlaks, Draltha, Rutherer, and some others). At that time I send a miner and my "militia" (typically the dorf with the second axe, but without any training, but still in a squad that can be ordered around) and send this dorf in to map the cavern. I withdraw the squad as soon as I see something dangerous, close the drawbridge (outer or inner depending on whether I might want to capture the critter) and wait for a new "safe" moment. You may want to set up a civilian alert that excludes the cavern either to stop civilians from rushing out into the cavern to collect every creature remain in there, or go on a suicide "auto collect webs" hunt or to provide you with a means to call them back when nasties enter.

[Daris]

I am also fairly new to the game, but have found the there is little to fear in caverns if you are sufficiently cautious.

I wall off my first cavern strike and then build a long-ish tunnel 3 wide that hits the cavern at a fairly level spot.  In the tunnel goes 2 raising bridges that can seal off the fortress when a forgotten beast arrives.  I leave as long of a stretch as I can in between them, and put a wooden door in there somewhere, just empty against the wall.  The distance critters have to cover, combined with the attractive power of the door to building destroyers, gives my dwarves the maximum time possible to react to the "pull lever" command and trap uninvited guests between the bridges.

In between the bridges, I put a long perpendicular corridor (again: as long as possible because dwarves sometimes take forever to pull the levers) that has its own sealing bridges and which connects with my fortress at a second point.  This corridor is only 1 wide and full of steel spike traps connected to a single lever.  This normally remains sealed.

This is the FB trap.  When a FB arrives, it gets trapped in the 3-wide corridor, at which point I open up the secondary entrance.  The FB then tries to path into my fortress through the trap, and gets caught again between the two bridges, at which point the spike traps can be triggered repeatedly by putting "pull the lever" on repeat to kill the FB.

It's low-tech - there are better ways to automate a repeating task, but time is not of the essence when the FB can't leave the trap - and the time required to complete this setup is minimal.  No military is required to deal with the FBs, which means that even deadly-dust FBs can be handled safely.  If you complete this setup before breaching the cavern the second time, the risk to your dwarves, while never zero, is minimized.

Caverns are pretty awesome.  They are a good source of high-quality meat and leather - giant toads and giant olms are easy to trap and easy to train, and have a 4x butchering modifier.  Cave crocodiles also produce high-quality meat, and also eggs, and they can be domesticated.  Once you hit a wet cavern, your muddied stone and underground soil layers will start to sprout floor fungus, which allows you to keep your grazing livestock underground.  A single giant cave spider can produce effectively limitless quantities of high-value silk with the correct setup.  Ordinary cave spider silk is almost valueless, though, so I would add a "Collect webs" task to your loom and suspend it, so your weaver doesn't keep going to the cavern for it.

Caverns are like the aboveground area, in that generally only 1 group of a single species of critter will be present.  I have seen this violated from time to time and I don't know why it happens, but if you find a giant olm chillaxing in the middle of a pool you are probably safe exploring the remainder of the cavern and setting up traps to capture desirable critters, leastwise until the olm decides to move on.

Good luck!

[PatrikLundell]

I think the chance of dual critter groups is increased in savage biomes. I don't know if it's zero otherwise.

[Thrudq]

It's worth keeping in mind that building destroyers can't bypass a locked hatch from underneath.  If you build stairs straight down into the cavern (breaching it from above instead of from the side) a hatch will allow your dorfs easy access to the cave while also serving as an instantly activated, impossible to bypass barrier if some terrible gribbly shows up.

[PatrikLundell]

The hatch method is a bit too cheaty for my taste (I'm not consistent: I happily use impulse ramps because they're convenient and cool. At least that's what I tell myself).
I prefer to use a door. Most of the nasty critters are building destroyers, but making them destroy a door buys the time needed for a lever operated drawbridge to be triggered.

[Montieth]

I like to build what Daris builds more or less in terms of Gates but with less weapon traps and such but with additional fortifications so I can use any creepy crawly nasties as training fodder for my 2nd or 3rd crossbow squads. You can do a slow and cautious cavern exploration by digging tunnels up and over the caverns and then smoothing/fortifying a wall to have rooms that look out into the unexplored sections and thus reveal more of the map. I use this for exploring the lower layer caverns as well.

I also have started building a mason's shop and track/hatch/pressure plate system to drop a supply of blocks into the cavern for when I want to wall in a portion or all the edge tiles to more or less seize/take over the entire cavern.

[Blue_Dwarf]

Spiders all over.

It's probably not spiders, but spider webs. Perfectly safe. You can see what critters are all over by pressing U>Tab.

[celem]

Unless of course, you 'k' and mouse over the web to see Giant Cave Spider Silk.  He's not going to be in the unit list, and you should treat the entire cavern with some prejudice.

Some good advice about sealing the breach and creating airlocks, but I will add that unless you want to hunt/trap the critters in there you dont actually need to do more than crack it.

Having made a hole into the caverns I tend to immediately seal it and go cut an artificial cavern in the soil layers.  This has the handy effect of pushing miners to Legendary as well as bringing all the underground trees and shrubs nice and shallow.  This then also becomes my primary grazing pasture.  As you breach lower caverns those spores will add into the mix and pretty quickly you can get all the flora available up top.  Secured herbalism, woodcutting and grazing is not to be sneezed at.

If I do really want access to the critters then I tend to prefer cage traps and constructing choke-points to actual hunting.  While a skilled and well-geared hunter might manage fine in the caverns for a long time there is a considerable range of possible spawns that will stomp him flat.  Instead I trap up the place and close the airlock.  Once a few traps are full i'll open the way in and station a squad to cover the reloading of the traps before locking down again.  In general you simply should not have dwarves wandering around unsecured caverns.

edit: also the very very first thing I always do when receiving a cavern discovery message is find my loom and suspend a silk gather job, you need time to think, which is not helped by the weaver bee-lining for the breach.

[Daris]

My main motivation in trying to secure the entire cavern and plan for FBs is that I find that loose FBs tank my FPS.  I run a blazing fast bleeding edge CAD station and am utterly spoiled by the fact that every non-DF program runs at lightspeed - I have no patience for FPS below 20.  Killing FBs is mandatory to maintain high FPS.