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[wierd]

I started a new "happy fairyland" embark to experiment with an idea for a flying buttress archology design that is tormenting my brain...

That is all fine and good, but the place is loaded with brown recluse spider silk. The dwarves are going bonkers picking the stuff, even though it is basically worthless.

Now then...  the kicker.

Brown recluse spiders don't really produce silk, like say, a member of the nephila genus (golden orb weavers) does.

They usually don't produce webs at all, other then thin useless cobwebs that cling tightly to a surface.  It would take hundreds of brown recluse spiders to make a tiny ball of silk.

Did toady research this at all? O.o

Given the insane difficulty in getting enough of it, it should command a high price from scaricty and novety.... but no. Its vermin silk, and is worth less than pigtail thread.

And the number of them in this forest is out of control. I have over 400 silk cloth of dubious value out of them already.

[proxn_punkd]

Spiders come in species now?

No, really, spiders were basically all the same, so if Toady really did implement spider species it doesn't surprise me that he hasn't gotten around to sorting out which are the weavers and which aren't.

[acetech09]

Sponsorship animal.

[wierd]

I should sponsor nephila genus spiders.

They make a durable dragline silk of exceptional quality, which has a unique "sunshine gold" (including a sort of lustre) color.

complimentary article

Far better than the shoe sabotaging, recrosis inducing, brown menace spiders I am dealing with now...

[smeeprocket]

I should sponsor nephila genus spiders.

They make a durable dragline silk of exceptional quality, which has a unique "sunshine gold" (including a sort of lustre) color.

complimentary article

Far better than the shoe sabotaging, recrosis inducing, brown menace spiders I am dealing with now...

That's awesome. I'm so glad the spiders aren't harmed.

[Splint]

Could always see if you can mod the value through the roof to represent this novelty.

The it'd be in your best interest to leave the little buggers alone and keep producing the meteric fucktons of silk you have reported getting from the little things.

[acetech09]

Actually, I might start modding a 'spider farm', a extension of the beekeeping labor, where spiders hives (spider farms) can be extracted for more valuable silk than the scavenged stuff.

[wierd]

Most spider species are highly territorial, and will eat each other on sight, or steal each other's prey.

That said, there are a few species that create enormous communal webs.

Harvesting the silk in a useful fashion with such a tangled 3D web would be difficlt... but this is the kind of thing I would expect a GCS to make when it sprays webs... so, (shrug).

[nenjin]

Wow. That's some straight up Tolkien shit right there. More of a "Murk Tree" than "Murk Wood."

[Shooer]

FYI before the sponsorship animals there where cave spiders, giant cave spiders and phantom spiders that lived in evil areas.

Also if you check the mod Corrosion, by IT 000, you will find a hive spider type.  Let's just say it caused some hilarity when I tried to set up a beekeeping industry, before I knew they existed.

[NW_Kohaku]

Many spiders are solitary predators. 

Many spiders, especially orb-weaving spiders, basically "min-max" evolutionarily by putting "all their character points" into being able to devote around a third of their body mass to silk and making elaborate web designs, and as a result, have very weak legs, are generally slow and clumsy, have poor eyesight, and actually can't tell the difference between a fellow spider of the same species and some prey that flew into their web.

Many "sexual cannibal" spider females actually aren't purposefully eating their mates - the female just couldn't tell it was a male spider of her species here to mate unless the male was plucking her web (they play web strings like a musical instrument to signify they are there to mate) and if he takes too long, she forgets he's there to mate and decides he must be prey.

As for the spider colonies like bee colonies, there are spiders that are communal web-builders.  Check out the 200-meter wide spider colony cobweb.  That was made by normal, non-giant, real-world spiders, and it's basically enough to cover an embark.   Harvest that.

Finally, Toady basically rush-jobbed many of the donation creatures because he simply wanted to get them all in within a year, and couldn't spend a month on every creature.  That's why he basically relied upon using the same code from the spiders he already had.

[simonthedwarf]

Sit down and eat your fly brain soup.

[slothen]

email toady.  Perhaps he'll find it novel enough to go and change the raws in the vanilla next time he does a release.

[agatharchides]

Most spider species are highly territorial, and will eat each other on sight, or steal each other's prey.

That said, there are a few species that create enormous communal webs.

Harvesting the silk in a useful fashion with such a tangled 3D web would be difficlt... but this is the kind of thing I would expect a GCS to make when it sprays webs... so, (shrug).

I wanna see what happens when a colony of army ants blunders into one of those. 

[ASCIt]

So...I vote for camel spiders.

If that don't curdle yer milk, nothin' will. Y'all.