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[Demonic Gophers]

Tamed or pet giant spiders -do- spit webs at anyone they are attacking. I modded it so I could get a lesser variety of giant spiders as war spiders for my dwarves and gave them GCS webbing, and when kobolds/etc wandered in they immediately spat webs and hacked the thing to pieces when it was caught.

The downside: the webs don't distinguish between your dwarves and the enemy, so expect them to get caught in it from time to time as they're collecting.

It helps if you designate the tiles of webbing as restricted from traffic, though doing this every time your silk-factory does its job is a nuisance, and that won't stop kittens from trampling the silk.

[bretrags]

I once caught a GCS in a room that I had already carved fortifications into the walls (mistake, I was trying for engravings and hit the wrong key).  I can verify that it did not shoot webs through the fortifications at anyone walking by, nor even the newbie marksdwarf that eventually came to shoot it some 2 seasons later.  And I was mining out much of that level, so dwarves were passing by pretty much constantly.

I think since it couldn't pathfind a way out of the room, it may have been in sort of a trance.  Or at least it wasn't going to bother webbing someone it couldn't then go eat.

[Misterstone]

OK, so I got a GCS in a cage now, and I am going to try to get a web operation going.

I was wondering, since we know that (according to the above post) they can't web through fortifications, do we know if they will shoot webs over a channel/empty space?  I am thinking that they may not be able to web something that they do not have a path to, so for instance if you have a setup like this:

Code: [Select]

'''''
'...'
'.S.'
'...'
'''''

Where ' is floor, and the . are empty space (channel) it might not be willing to shoot webs if it cannot get to the square its potential target is on.

I am not sure if I will try this, or simply toss it into a room like this:

Code: [Select]

#######
#    #
# ## #
#X##X#
# ## #
#    #
######

Where # is a wall and X are openable floodgates used to isolate part of circular area so the webs can be harvested when needed.  I would drop a little kitteh through a hole in the ceiling to give the GCS something to shoot at.

[WCG]

Will they set off a pressure plate? If so, tie a kitten to a restraint so that the spider can get to it down a narrow hallway. It should web the kitten from a distance, right? And then move towards it for the kill? (I'm a newbie, so I've never even seen a GCS.)

When it gets close, have it trip a pressure plate that will raise a bridge, blocking off the corridor. Go get your web, reset the pressure plate (not sure about this) and repeat.

Just an idea...

Bill

[Blucher]

I was wondering, since we know that (according to the above post) they can't web through fortifications, do we know if they will shoot webs over a channel/empty space?

They can web through fortifications and over channels.

A couple of weeks ago, I spent quite a bit of time reading these forums and trying out various ways to harvest a captured Giant Cave Spiders silk.  I settled on Dragonflare's simple, yet effective system (http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?topic=14197.15): basically a long room with a GCS on one side (lengthways) behind fortifications and one (passable, pet-forbidden) door on the end.

I used a dead dwarf's pet mule as bait chained up in the room on the other side of the fortifications.  The spider *would* occasionally spit webs but it was fairly infrequent and the amount of webs wasn't very high.  I seemed to get more webs if I placed the mule close to the fortifications.

I got about 5-10 threads a year, maybe, over the course of ~10 years or so.  Not bad considering it was free, but not enough to focus an industry around.

[jei]

>What would be the best way to capture and utilize cave spiders to produce silk?
Carefully, my friend, carefully. I got mine earlier just putting lots of cages around webbing, but this time, from reclaiming a 35 year fortress, I found out that I had one FB, Magma Crab and a GCS in cages. (So, to make myself a challenge, I play a game in terrifying tundra, with no metals at all, but a few trees growing on top (didn't think they mattered much, since they also grow in caves.) )

To make ends meet, I finally built a very nicely working Giant Cave Spider silk factory. And I plan to capture more FBs and HFs with it too for my zoos.

Now, the spider spits out silk about once per second. There is a dog in a chain behind fortifications next to it to make it do so, but with a pathable door (pet forbidden) route from the spider to the dog, just like was adviced here. There are more doors to forbid any dwarves to go there. (I put doors on both sides of the spider after learning that dwarves enjoy getting their silk straight from the spider if it's left empty room to roam.)

Now, I've built also trap-filled paths to be covered with the silk, with the paths going beside the spider, to capture some FBs. All nice and dandy, and as usual, a great plan, except...

the problem that these traps seem to have developed black hole -like qualities. Namely, I have a path ^^^ of traps with Fortifications on both sides, all covered in spider webs. No route in there, all doors forbidden, now just waiting for FBs. BUT,now, verified from a savegame, a dwarf has managed to enter the middle trap cage. -- It seems he was somehow sucked through the fortification to the cage trap while the spider constantly spits silk over covering them. That's the only explanation I can give.

Also, any dwarf entering an adjacent square to a cage trap covered by spider webbing, is sucked right into the trap, leading quickly to a lemming-like march of all the dwarves in to the cages... (Just like dwarves can get sucked/pushed through fortifications when pushed by water, so does apparently also spiderwebbing work.) Notice, that the dog is in another corridor. It is chained with no adjacent traps, so it doesn't get sucked into one as the chain isn't long enough. Or hasn't happened so far.

Now, if only I can somehow keep my dwarves out of these black hole cage traps, this should prove really fun when I open the HFS. I plan to guide the traffic through enough of them, and I figure it should even make this game perfectly winnable, I hope...

Anyone else make any other observations about GCS webbings or have interesting factories built around them? Does flooding influence the webbing or it's functions?

[Tirion]

The Human Necromancer jei gestures!
The thread shudders and begins to move!

[slothen]

Ok, can I get a description of how to do this for non-giant cave spiders?  I'm really at a loss.

Cave spiders are vermin, thus how do you get them where you want?  They kind of blink in and out.  If they show up in caverns, how does the game distinguish between the cavern biome and areas of your fortress that are dug out that are near the cavern?  The wiki says tame cave spiders don't work because they would be in cages.  Can you not tame them and release them, or are they only tame when inside a cage?  If you catch them and release them somewhere, will they blink away like other vermin?  Will they stay inside a room where they're released?

[Larix]

Edit: getting a normal cave spider where you want it is tricky. They only rarely and very randomly enter your fortress, although it _seems_ that they occasionally spawn inside randomly. They're in constant danger from cats and cannot be captured in cage traps, only in 'animal traps'. Animal traps are even more unintuitive and frustrating than cage traps.

Just piping in here for a little cave spider advertisement - yes, cave spiders, _not_ giant. These critters are vermin beasts, thus will not trigger cage traps and will not be shown on the unit list. If you ever get lucky and spot one, it will wink in and out of sight as an unassuming white point. The only way to trap it is with an 'animal trap' and through employing a 'trapper', i.e. a dwarf with the mostly-useless 'trapping' labour. You either tell the trapper to 'catch a small land animal' at the kennel, preferably on repeat, with alternating 'tame small creature' repeat jobs; or you order a bunch of animal traps built and baited. Any traps that catch an animal will be collected and brought to the animal stockpile. If a trapper manages to nab a creature by jumping after it and grabbing it with the trap, they'll just drop it on the spot and let an animal hauler dwarf bring it in.

Cave spiders usually only crop up in the caverns, but when you breach the caverns (maybe even just with fortifications), they can wander into your fortress proper, and with a lot of luck, your trapper may go after them and collect them. Like most other vermin, they can be tamed at the kennel, with the 'tame small creature' job. Once tamed, stick it in a built cage, connect the cage to a lever, pull the lever. This releases your tame spidery friend and allows it to go after its business of webbing up the place. For convenience, do this in a room behind two or more doors, locked most of the time. Only unlock the doors periodically to let your weavers collect the webs. I keep the doors 'tightly closed' when unlocked - and i use multiple doors, too - to keep out cats. I haven't tried it with cave spiders yet, but my first tame recluse spider was quickly killed by a cat. Cave spider silk is nowhere near as valuable as giant cave spider silk, but once you get lucky and catch one of the critters, it's very easy to manage and doesn't require fussing around with hostiles, sight blocking and all that jazz.

[slothen]

does building the kennel near the caverns improve the chance the trapper will go after a spider?
Can tame spiders be released via unassigning them from a built cage (instead of levers)
Once released, do they no longer blink in and out?  Or do vermin still exist (hidden) when they blink out?
Is taming necessary?

[Larix]

- strategic placing of the kennel might help if you assign it to a single trapper who also pulls training duty there. This way, they should start looking for a catchable creature while already at the kennel. Haven't tried this myself, though.
- i remember that unassigning a vermin animal from a cage will cause the dwarf to just move it to an animal trap instead of actually releasing it. Cage/lever is the way to go.
- they'll keep blinking, but this really just turns them invisible for a bit. They will remain in existence and will not leave a locked room.
- taming, i've got no idea, i just made an interlaced list of 'catch land animal R' and 'tame small creature R' five times to keep my trappers busy. Tamed vermin can be allowed for adoption as a pet, which is completely counterproductive (the next cat will just eat it and the dwarf won't care; an adopted vermin bird causes massive cancellation spam because tame creature maintenance clashes horribly with vermin bird behaviour) and trappers _may_ leave released tame vermin alone. You could try releasing a non-tame cave spider and see what happens. Keep in mind that captured cave spiders are a pretty uncommon thing, getting more than fluke solitaires may require constant open access to the caverns and all the FUN they contain.

[slothen]

thanks again for the thorough replies.  This is actually my first fort I've been played with invaders_off, and while dealing with goblins is never that big a deal, it causes a lot of mess and delay (doing some interesting architectural work and some ambitious fluid engineering).  The real benefit is no FBs lurking in the caverns, so there isn't much downside to leaving the caverns accessible all the time, so I'll probably build like 5 kennels in the caves and have a bunch of dorfs searching for spiders.

[jei]

The Human Necromancer jei gestures!
The thread shudders and begins to move!

Sorry, I googled the topic and had to respond, since I tried this GCS thing based on this thread.

Anyway, some further development I noted. I caged my GCS and the suck-in quality of the spiderweb covered traps seems to have ceased.

It seems the spider may be somehow involved in it actively and a live and spitting spider will somehow enhance the traps. Otherwise they seem
just relatively normal traps, although I got some (only 3) dwarves accidentally in traps as I collected the rest of the silk; this is still nowhere near
the 100% suck-in capture rate that was in effect when the spider was still spitting the webs.

Also, aside from a dwarf deciding to go greet the GCS in person once, I have yet to have anyone shoot it. I have 2 corridors with fortifications beside it.
GCS silk is really worth tons and I now find myself in possession of 800+ pcs of each kind of silk craft, each worth 300-1000 easily, so I can afford to test a little, although I would like a couple more GCS, so I can make a proper FB-trap & demon trap with their own dedicated GCS.

You definitely need to plan on how you want to stop production and recage the GCS, for renovations and relocations. (Just separate the GCS with a forbidden door from some cage trapsm along the path to the chained animal it is pathing to.) I have a "field" area where silk is collected and it is now just full of crap that the dwarves have dropped and that was stuck in the silk.

Still wondering, how this stuff would move and work with some wated dumped on it from above, and potential further applications, as well as any similarities to water-covered traps, or moving-water -covered traps.

FWIW; I just killed all my cats or kept them in cages, to protect all my GCS in the start of the game. Now I'm running short on dogs..

And update: accidentally taming the caged GCS seems to have botched my silk production factory. No more spitting of webs, even if I chain a rabid wolf next to the spider...

[fricy]

Hmmm, strange. I did not experience this "black-hole" behavior of silked traps through fortifications, though I managed to lose a couple of dwarfs to silk enchanced weapon traps. Last victim was my very first and very best soldier...idiots

In my silk factory I'm using tame forest spiders with a wild mongoose, this is the best combo so far, as my weavers can approach the silk without freaking out because of either the spidy or the animal. First I tried using orcs as a bait, but that design needed manual intervention to raise a bridge every time I wanted to collect. Only problem is that I get spammed with Urist McWeaver cancelled task: Webbed, but I can live with that. I don't even think that my design has a valid path between my spiders and my bait, all doors are forbidden and the mongoose is pitted from a level up. - If a wild wolf doesn't work for you try pitting a goblin as a bait.

Oh, and if you have a GCS and not regular CS then you don't have to worry about your cats killing your spider. Think Shelob from LOTR. No cats can kill a spider THAT BIG.

(FYI: I'm playing Masterwork mod, not vanilla DF, but the mechanism should work the same. Only difference is that I could order a breeding pair of spiders from the elves...)

[slothen]

Just a thought on dwarves being sucked through fortifications by webs, is it possible that the web struck the dwarf as a projectile and he flew through?
GCS silk factories can be built with either tame or wild GCS, so that might effect much of the behavior you're observing.  Also, I recall the thread on demon silk, and I believe one of the conclusions was that demons can only be webbed (and thus captured) by web-shooting demons, not GCS or forgotten beasts.