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[Egregius]

I'm talking about the vermin cave spiders, which were a pillar of my economy. Started on a location with an underground river, and cave spider webs started showing up, together with olm corpses and miasma. Did some experimenting with underground towercap farms, and occasionally I flushed the area where they dwelled. But they would show up in a nearby hallway, and after the flooding, in the muddied area one floor lower and near the river again.

Had some trouble keeping cats out, since they occasionally follow dwarfs through open non-pet-passable doors apparently, but the spiders would reappear regularly...until some point. I'm not sure what triggered it, because there was some overharvesting of webs perhaps after a long time of not harvesting, but I was thinking it might have been triggered by taming a captured cave spider. Or perhaps the loss of habitat, because I dug some more area for them to inhabit, which might not be to their liking or something.

Any ideas? There's been plenty of season- (and year-) changes since then, and I'm not seeing miasma of either dead cave spiders/olms in case it's the cats' fault. Any way to get them back? Would releasing my sole remaining (tame) spider start spawning more of them?

[XSI]

I think too many of the spiders just died, and they are now completely gone. To check, make a backup of your save game and export the world data in legends mode(Have to abandon, which is why you make the backup).

In one of the text files it exported, search your fort, it will list all creatures in it, including the cave spiders, if it's at 0, then they're just gone.

As for the cause, I think it's the cats, a single cat can kill a lot of vermin, I suggest that next time you use either a airlock system to move dwarves/goods in and out of the cave spider locations, or just install a lot more doors that aren't allowed for pets to make sure they can't get in there.

I don't know if setting loose that one spider will spawn more.

[Martin]

I had the same thing happen with Morul. He killed all of them.

Now, my map is completely (as in every single tile - 7,000 worth) covered with webs around the chasm and I had the dwarves start collecting but I stopped for a siege and forgot to start them again.

I'm not sure but I think the spiders may have returned after about 30 years, around when the other wildlife returned. If you're willing to wait a while, you might get them back, but yes, you can kill them all off.

[Egregius]

In that case: darn. I read on the DF wiki that vermin automatically respawns each season simply depending on biome presence, but guess not. But it does mean other vermin can be permanently disposed of and thus cats? Nice.

I'll try releasing my spider and see what happens.