ArachnoMod a.k.a. The Netherite Octoarachnopod

(THAT Netherite Spider)

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A boss-grade fight whichever face it wears: the netherite juggernaut packs 350 HP inside the stats of a full netherite armor suit; the mossy camo stalker runs 600 unarmored HP and hopes you never spot it; the warped poison striker carries 500 unarmored HP, and a venomous tarantula lunge; and the pitch-black HUNTER (400 HP, player-sized, dead silent) only moves when you're not looking. Kill it and it might just drop the netherite it's made of.

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⚠️🕷️ ARACHNOPHOBIA WARNING

This mod is not kind to anyone with arachnophobia. Please read before installing. The spider in this mod is not a blocky vanilla mob: its eight legs are animated by a live inverse-kinematics simulation, so it moves, scurries, and plants each foot with unsettlingly lifelike, realistic spider motion — the exact kind of movement arachnophobia responds to. It also:

• hunts you — it spots you from far away, stares you down, and charges;
• is enormous — up to ~16 blocks tall, towering over the trees as it closes in;
• can be camouflaged (v1.1.1) — the CAMO variant blends into the terrain and sounds like ordinary footsteps, so it can get very close before you notice it;
• can pounce — the POISON variant rears up with its front legs raised and lunges at you, exactly like a real tarantula strike;
• can stalk — the pitch-black HUNTER variant follows you in total silence and only moves when you're not looking at it.

There is no "cute mode." If realistic spider movement is a problem for you or the people on your server, this may genuinely be an uncomfortable experience… consider hostileOnlyAtNight = true, lowering maxSize, or sitting this one out. You have been warned. 🕸️

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Somewhere in your world, a spider is SPRINTING toward you at terrifying speed.

ArachnoMod adds a single, relentless, procedurally animated spider that stalks players across the world. Its eight legs are solved in real time with FABRIK inverse kinematics and drawn entirely with vanilla BlockDisplay entities. Every step is calculated, not pre-baked, so it scuttles believably over any terrain. A giant, procedurally-animated spider that hunts you across the world. One roams at a time, respawning every 40 minutes. It towers over the trees and charges in at incredible speed the farther away you are, then shrinks down as it closes for a 6-heart bite. Its eight legs are driven by real FABRIK inverse-kinematics, drawn entirely with vanilla BlockDisplay entities — so it walks, scurries, and clambers like nothing else in Minecraft.

But this isn't a tech demo for movement physics.

It's a hunter.

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ArachnoMod runs on Fabric, Forge and NeoForge — across 26.1.2, 1.21.1 and 1.20.1:

Loader	Minecraft	Requires
Fabric	26.1.2	Fabric API + Fabric Language Kotlin (Java 25; Quilt Loader runs this jar too)
NeoForge	26.1.2	Kotlin for Forge (Java 25; NeoForge 26.1.2.94+)
Fabric	1.21.1	Fabric API + Fabric Language Kotlin
NeoForge	1.21.1	Kotlin for Forge
Forge	1.20.1	Kotlin for Forge (also loads on NeoForge 1.20.1)
Fabric	1.20.1	Fabric API + Fabric Language Kotlin

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🕷️ Features

• One spider, always hunting. Exactly one exists at a time. It wanders the world looking for the nearest player within its chase distance.
• Wander / Alert / Chase AI. When no one's around, the spider calmly patrols its territory — and it pre-scans every patrol route block-by-block before walking it, planning around lava, water, chasms, and cliff edges instead of tumbling into them. The instant it spots you, it freezes and snaps to face you — one heart-stopping beat — then charges. It keeps chasing until you truly escape (wider give-up radius than its detection radius, so no flickering at the boundary). Optional hostileOnlyAtNight mode makes it docile in daylight like a vanilla spider.
• The hunt has pacing. The first spider arrives about a minute into a session — no long wait for the main event. Slay it, and you've earned two full Minecraft days (40 min) of real peace — no respawn treadmill. And if you hide in Peaceful? It returns one minute after peace ends. Peace has a price. 😈 (All three timers configurable.)
• Idle life. Disable wandering and the spider becomes a living statue instead of a frozen one: it breathes — a slow body-bob that scales with its size — and occasionally grooms, lifting its front legs to its mouth and cleaning them with a smooth sweeping rub while leaning down. Yes, the murder kaiju is, briefly, adorable.
• The CAMO variant. A second spider that can naturally spawn (25% by default, still only ONE spider ever) with ACTIVE CAMOUFLAGE: every leg continuously repaints itself as the actual block it's standing on — grass legs in the meadow, sand legs on the beach, stone legs in the mountains, changing leg-by-leg as it walks. Its footsteps play the real step sound of the block underfoot, exactly like player footsteps — it crunches on gravel, thuds on dirt, and goes whisper-quiet on wool. You won't see it coming. You might not hear it either.
• The POISON variant. ☠️ A third spider (20% of spawns by default) sheathed in the eerie blue-teal of warped wart, its footsteps squishing like the Nether fungus it's made of. It fights like a real tarantula: in striking range it rears up, front legs raised — that's your only warning — then LUNGES, hurling its whole body at you. The bite is gentler than its cousins' (3 hearts) but injects Poison II for 30 seconds. 500 HP and no armor… but with the venom ticking, the clock is yours to worry about.
• The HUNTER variant. 🖤 A fourth spider (15% of spawns by default), pitch black, player-sized and always exactly that size, and completely silent — no footsteps, ever. And it takes your eyes: get within ~16 blocks of it while it's stalking and it blinds you, keeping the blindness topped up for as long as you stay near it — the only cure is to actually get away. A thing that only moves when you aren't looking, in a world where you can't look. It doesn't charge. It stalks: it closes in FAST (1.6× chase speed), but only while nobody is looking at it — the moment your view swings toward it, it freezes dead-still, mid-stride, legs in the air. Every glance away brings it closer. Within a few blocks it stops caring about your eyes. Hide in a hole, and it doesn't dig or squeeze — it camps outside, motionless, waiting. 400 HP. Walks through doorways at its size. Check behind you.
• Safe spawning. Spawns (and patrol routes) are validated for solid, dry ground — no more spiders in the void, over oceans, or inside SkyBlock gaps. Keeps the configured spawn distance whenever possible, preferring farther over closer; never pops up in your face.
• Procedural 8-leg animation. No canned animations — every step is solved live with FABRIK IK and rendered through vanilla BlockDisplays. Buttery-smooth motion.
• Grows with distance. Far away it's a towering giant (up to ~16 blocks tall); as it closes in it shrinks down to bite you. The feet stay planted at every size.
• Charges faster the farther it is — up to 8× speed — so distance is no safety.
• It follows you between dimensions. 🌀 Portal away and a few seconds later it re-emerges near you — the Nether, the End, or any modded dimension: the follow keys on where the players are, not which portal was used. There is still only ever ONE spider.
• No hole is safe. Dig in, and it applies constant pressure, re-evaluating every tick — the instant a block breaks or a ramp opens, it pours through. And a 1×1×1 hidey-hole? It SQUEEZES: shrinks below its minimum size, slips down the shaft after you, bites, and regrows on the way out (squeezeSize).
• It goes around corners — and lets itself in. 🚪 A wall it can't climb no longer stops (or confuses) it: the chase steers around obstacles, hugging walls to the corner and turning in after you. And when a building blocks it, it hunts for the way in — scanning for a 1×2 doorway or even a 1×1 crawl-hole, walking to it, and shrinking just enough to slip through. Closed doors and trapdoors don't count as walls: it comes through them anyway. Your house is not the safe side of the door. (chasePathfinding, on by default.)
• No lake is safe. Deep water used to drown it while you watched from a boat. Now it grows just tall enough to ride above the surface — pond, river, or open ocean — and keeps coming. (growInWater, on by default; turn it off if you want water to stay a weakness.)
• Lava sorts the variants. 🔥 The netherite spider is fireproof like the gear it's made of — it wades through lava lakes unburnt and unbothered. The camo and poison variants burn — visibly, flames licking up their legs.
• Boss-grade fight. The netherite variant: 350 HP wrapped in the exact stats of a full netherite armor suit (20 armor, 12 toughness) — it shrugs off most of every blow, and lands a 6-heart bite. The camo variant: 600 HP, no armor, same bite — softer, but you have to find it first. The poison variant: 500 HP, and the venom does the talking. Bring friends.
• Netherite trophy drop. A 50% chance to drop a netherite ingot on death (it is made of the stuff) — the ingot lands on the ground directly beneath the spider, at any height or depth, so your prize is always where you'd look.
• Taming & riding. A creative-only Spider Tamer makes it docile, then you can ride it like a mount — full omnidirectional steering on all four movement keys, always facing where you look.
• ENRAGE it — if you dare. ⚡ Right-click the netherite spider with a netherite ingot — feed it the very metal it's made of — and it becomes the Enraged Netherite Spider: a true boss with a red boss bar, more health (700), 1.5× speed, a 10-heart bite, and a crackling aura of red rage-dust and blue lightning sparks. Kill it and it always drops a FULL netherite block — nine ingots back for the one you fed it. Risk it for the biscuit.
• Peaceful-safe. On Peaceful difficulty, it despawns, and natural spawns pause, like any monster.
• Optional PERMADEATH. 🏆 Prefer it to be a boss you can actually finish? Set permadeath = true and killing it once ends the hunt in that world — permanently, saved to the world, surviving restarts. Off by default.
• Fully configurable & hot-reloading. Every gameplay number lives in a commented config file you can edit live (see Configuration).
• Spawn egg included — spawn your own Netherite Octoarachnopod from the creative menu.

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🎮 Commands

All under /spider:

Command	What it does	OP level
/spider newinstance [size]	Spawns your personal follower spider that trails you around at the chosen size (0.3–20). A creative-mode toy.	Creative only
/spider size	Live-resizes your personal spider (0.3–20).	Anyone (own spider)
/spider release	Dismisses your personal spider.	Anyone
/spider chasedistance	Sets how far (8–256) the wild spider spots and chases players. Saves into the config file.	Ops (permission level 2)
/spider config get	Shows any config value in chat.	Ops (permission level 2)
/spider config set [value]	Live-edits ANY of the 65 config values in-game — typed, range-checked arguments with full tab-completion (sound keys tab-complete against every sound in the game). Applies to the active spider instantly and saves straight into the config file.	Ops (permission level 2)

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⚙️ Configuration

All tunables live in config/arachnomod-common.toml, created on first launch. It's fully commented and hot-reloads — edit the file, and most changes apply to a running world within moments, no restart needed. (Spawn/gait values are read when a spider spawns, so let the current one respawn to apply those.) Every key is also live-editable in-game with /spider config <key> set <value>.

Spawning

Key	Default	Meaning
spawnMinMinutes	1.0	Min minutes before the FIRST spider of a session spawns
spawnMaxMinutes	1.0	Max minutes before the FIRST spawn (random between the two)
respawnAfterKillMinutes	40.0	Cooldown after the spider is KILLED (40 = 2 Minecraft days of earned peace)
permadeath	false	BOSS MODE: kill it once, and it NEVER returns in that world (saved to the world, survives restarts)
peacefulExitSpawnMinutes	1.0	The spider returns this many minutes after Peaceful is switched off 😈
spawnDistanceMin	30.0	Closest a spider naturally spawns from a player (blocks)
spawnDistanceMax	34.0	Farthest a spider naturally spawns from a player (blocks)
spawnAngleAttempts	24	Directions tested per candidate distance when hunting safe spawn ground
spawnMaxVerticalSearch	48	How deep below the heightmap to look for solid ground (SkyBlock-friendly)
spawnCloseFallbackDistance	6.0	SKYBLOCK LAST RESORT: if nothing at/beyond spawnDistanceMin is solid, sweep inward to this distance (0 = off, keep the strict minimum)
relocateDistanceBlocks	192.0	If the spider ends up this far from every player while its chunk is still loaded, it relocates back near one (0 = off)
camoVariantChance	0.25	Chance a spawned spider is the CAMO variant (natural spawns AND spawn eggs)
poisonVariantChance	0.2	Chance a spawned spider is the POISON variant (rolled before the camo chance)
hunterVariantChance	0.15	Chance a spawned spider is the pitch-black HUNTER variant (rolled first)

Chase & speed

Key	Default	Meaning
chaseDistance	64.0	How far the spider spots & chases players (blocks)
chaseExitDistanceMultiplier	1.25	Give-up radius = chaseDistance × this (prevents boundary flicker)
alertReactionTicks	10	The freeze-and-stare beat before it charges (0 = instant charge)
hostileOnlyAtNight	false	Only hunts at night, like a vanilla spider
chasePathfinding	true	Steer around unclimbable walls and shrink through doorways/crawl-holes while chasing (false = old straight-line charge)
chaseSpeedBlocksPerSecond	8.0	Top chase speed at normal size
hunterSpeedMultiplier	1.6	The HUNTER's speed (× base chase speed) while it moves — it only moves when unwatched
hunterBlindnessRange	16.0	How close the stalking HUNTER must be to blind you; it re-blinds while you stay in range (0 = off)
hunterBlindnessSeconds	30.0	How long the HUNTER's blindness lasts once you are out of its range
speedGrowthFactor	8.0	Speed multiplier at maximum size
legStepSpeed	1.1	How fast the legs swing — the "scurry"

Wandering & idle

Key	Default	Meaning
enableWandering	true	Calm patrol when no player is in range (false = stands still)
wanderSpeedFactor	0.35	Patrol speed as a fraction of chase speed
wanderRadius	24.0	How far it patrols from its anchor point
wanderMinIntervalSeconds	3.0	Shortest commitment to one patrol heading
wanderMaxIntervalSeconds	9.0	Longest commitment to one patrol heading
wanderPauseChance	0.25	Chance it pauses instead of picking a new heading
groomingChance	0.03	Chance per second that the idle spider grooms (wandering disabled; 0 = off)

Size & growth

Key	Default	Meaning
minSize	0.6	Size right next to a player
squeezeSize	0.25	The size it SQUEEZES down to over a player hiding in a hole — 0.25 just fits a 1×1×1
maxSize	15.0	Size when far away (15 towers over the trees)
sizeNearDistance	4.0	At/below this distance the spider is at minSize
sizeFarDistance	32.0	At/above this distance the spider is at maxSize
growPercentPerTick	12.0	Fastest it can grow (%/tick)
shrinkPercentPerTick	25.0	Fastest it can shrink (%/tick)
riddenSize	2.0	Stable size while a player is riding it
hunterSize	1.1	The HUNTER's FIXED size — it never grows or shrinks (1.1 = a head taller than a player; fits doorways as-is)
poisonSize	1.0	The POISON variant's FIXED size — roughly player height. It never grows or shrinks with distance (0.3–5.0)
growInWater	true	In water, grow just big enough to ride above the surface instead of drowning (false = deep water stays a drowning trap)

Combat & drops

Key	Default	Meaning
netheriteMaxHealth	350.0	Max health of the netherite variant (it also wears full netherite-suit armor stats)
netheriteArmor	20.0	The netherite variant's armor points (20 = a full netherite suit). Set to 0 for an unarmoured 350 HP target (0–30)
netheriteArmorToughness	12.0	Its armor toughness (12 = a full netherite suit) — this is what blunts heavy hits (0–20)
netheriteKnockbackResistance	0.4	Its knockback resistance, 0–1 (a netherite suit is 0.1 per piece)
netheriteLegs	8	How many legs the netherite spider has (1–16; 8 is the classic octopod). 1–2 drag and flail; 4+ stride properly
camoMaxHealth	600.0	Max health of the camo variant (no armor)
poisonMaxHealth	500.0	Max health of the poison variant (no armor — its danger is the bite)
hunterMaxHealth	400.0	Max health of the hunter variant (no armor — it was never supposed to be seen)
netheriteAttackDamageHearts	6.0	The netherite variant's bite, in hearts before your armour
camoAttackDamageHearts	5.0	The camo variant's bite, in hearts before armour
hunterAttackDamageHearts	4.0	The hunter variant's bite, in hearts before armour
poisonAttackDamageHearts	3.0	The poison variant's bite damage in hearts (every bite also injects Poison II)
poisonEffectSeconds	30.0	How long the Poison II from the poison variant's bite lasts
attackCooldownTicks	20	Ticks between melee hits (20 = 1/sec)
netheriteDropChance	0.5	Chance to drop a netherite ingot on death
enragedMaxHealth	700.0	Max health of an ENRAGED netherite spider (right-click it with a netherite ingot; it keeps its armor suit)
enragedSpeedMultiplier	1.5	Chase-speed multiplier while enraged
enragedAttackDamageHearts	10.0	The enraged boss's bite damage in hearts (it always drops a FULL netherite block)

Variant sounds (the netherite spider always keeps its iconic clank; camo plays the real sound of the block underfoot)

Key	Default	Meaning
variantStepSound	block.moss.step	Fallback step sound for non-netherite variants
variantStepVolume	0.3	Volume of variant steps (also scales camo's block-matched steps)
variantLandSound	block.moss.fall	Fallback landing sound for non-netherite variants
variantLandVolume	1.0	Volume of variant landings

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🥚 Encountering it

You don't have to do anything. One spawns on its own and comes looking after a minute of loading into the world. But if you want to summon one yourself, grab the Netherite Octoarachnopod spawn egg from the Spawn Eggs creative tab.

It dies like any other mob. Beat it down, and it goes poof, dropping exactly 1 Netherite ingot (50% chance).

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📦 Requirements

Minecraft 26.1.2 (Fabric or NeoForge) — needs Java 25, which is Minecraft's own requirement for 26.1, not the mod's:

• Fabric: Fabric API + Fabric Language Kotlin. Quilt Loader runs this same jar — no separate build needed.
• NeoForge: 26.1.2.94 or newer, plus Kotlin for Forge.
• There is no Forge build for 26.x — MinecraftForge hasn't released one to build against.

Neoforge:

• Minecraft 1.21.1
• NeoForge 21.1.x
• Kotlin for Forge (REQUIRED. Install it alongside this mod - FOR NEOFORGE ONLY.)

Forge:

• Minecraft 1.20.1
• Kotlin for Forge (REQUIRED. Install it alongside this mod - FOR FORGE ONLY.)

Fabric:

• Minecraft 1.21.1
• Fabric API
• Fabric Language Kotlin (REQUIRED. Install it alongside this mod - FOR FABRIC ONLY.)

📜 Full changelog

v1.8.4 (latest) — now on SIX builds

• RIDE IT IN ANY DIRECTION. 🕷️ Steering a tamed spider used to be one key: hold W and it walked wherever you were looking. Now all four movement keys work — W and S drive forward and back along your line of sight, A and D strafe across it, and the spider keeps facing wherever you look while it moves. Sidestep along a ledge, back out of a tunnel, circle a target without ever turning away from it. On the 1.20.1 and 1.21.1 builds the movement impulses are read at their full precision rather than as simple on/off, so partial input carries through at its actual strength.
• IT COMES IN THROUGH THE DOOR NOW, INSTEAD OF SITTING ON YOUR ROOF. 🏠 If you sheltered inside a building, the spider would walk up at full size, step onto the roof — the only surface a body that big can stand on — and camp there directly above you, forever. Two things were wrong:
  • The spider couldn't tell that a room was a room. Its "how much space is where my prey is standing" check demanded walls immediately either side of you, which is true in a corridor and false in the middle of any ordinary room. So every building read as open ground and it never learned it had to shrink to get in.
  • It was told to shrink far too late. The warning distance was a flat 14 blocks, but a big spider is also a fast spider and covers far more than that while it's shrinking — it was already standing on your roof before it started. The distance now scales with how big it currently is.
  • Out in the open nothing changes: a ceiling alone isn't shelter, so standing under a tree still gets you the full towering horror.
• NEW: MINECRAFT 26.1.2, on Fabric and NeoForge. 🕸️ The spider makes the jump to the new version scheme — the same mod, same feature set, same config, rebuilt against 26.1.2. This was a real port, not a recompile: 26.1 is the first unobfuscated Minecraft, and eleven releases of API changes sit between it and 1.21.1. Notable for anyone curious: ResourceLocation became Identifier, entity registration and spawn eggs were overhauled, and command permissions stopped being numbers.
  • Requires Java 25 — that's Minecraft's own requirement for 26.1, not the mod's.
  • Quilt players are covered by the Fabric jar. Quilt Loader supports 26.1.2 and runs Fabric mods; a separate Quilt build isn't needed (and isn't possible — Quilt's own standard libraries were discontinued in December 2025).
  • No Forge build for 26.x. MinecraftForge has no release for any 26 version, so there is nothing to build against. The 1.20.1 Forge build is unaffected and still supported.
  • A brand-new spawn egg. 🥚 26.1 retired the old tinted spawn-egg template that every mod used, so the Octoarachnopod's egg is now hand-drawn pixel art in the style of the modern per-mob eggs — a dark netherite shell with a red-eyed spider face. (The 1.20.1 and 1.21.1 builds keep their classic tinted egg, which still works fine there.)
  • Everything the first 26.1.2 play session turned up is fixed. These were caught and fixed before release, so they never reached anyone — listed for the curious: the spawn egg and Spider Tamer drew as missing-texture blocks (26.1 requires a new per-item definition file that didn't exist before), the advancement tab's background was a missing texture (backgrounds became sprite IDs), the two kill advancements — Eight Legs Later and Rage Against the Machine — could never be earned (the kill-credit field changed type, so the check silently never matched), and riding was completely dead — you could mount the spider but not move, because the server stopped reporting rider input the old way. All six builds were then re-verified against the same test suite and report identical results.
• SKYBLOCK / SKYBASE SUPPORT. 🏝️ On a floating-island world the spider often never spawned at all, and cranking the spawn settings couldn't save it. Two things were wrong, and both are fixed:
  • spawnAngleAttempts was capped at 64. A small island is only a thin slice of the circle around you, so most directions find nothing but void and you need far more samples. The ceiling is now 1024.
  • The search could never look CLOSER than spawnDistanceMin. It only ever swept outward — and on a skybase everything outward is void, because the only land in the world is the island under your feet, inside that minimum. So no number of angles could ever help. Once every normal option is exhausted, the search now sweeps inward in 1-block steps down to the new spawnCloseFallbackDistance (default 6 blocks; set 0 to disable and keep the strict minimum). It still takes the farthest spot the island offers and only ends up close if that's genuinely all there is.
  • Verified in a real void world: a 13×13 island had no spawnable ring at all at or beyond the minimum distance even with 1024 angles — and now spawns reliably.
  • Thanks to NetherySiloX for reporting it and pushing for the cap to go. 🕷️

v1.8.3 — all four builds

• The Enraged boss's name label is properly gone now. 🏷️ v1.8.2 hid it, but hiding wasn't enough — anything carrying a custom name is still fair game for vanilla's name rendering and for HUD mods like Jade, WTHIT and TheOneProbe, which draw it regardless. The boss simply doesn't get a custom name anymore. The big red boss bar is untouched — it carries its own name and is now the only place the title appears. Death messages read "Netherite Octoarachnopod".

v1.8.2 — all four builds

• Fixed: the giant no longer strobes between huge and tiny. 🔁 Backing away from it made it flicker wildly instead of growing to its full towering size. The tight-space sense that lets it fit through your doorways was reading ordinary scenery as a ceiling — a tree trunk under its feet counted as a zero-height roof, and a leaf canopy three blocks over its feet was "low ceiling" to a body ten blocks tall — so it shrank, the ground beneath it changed, the cap lifted, it regrew, forever. A ceiling now only counts if the spider is actually under it. It grows to full size and stays there. 🕷️
• It comes to you instead of getting lost. 🧭 If the living spider ends up more than 192 blocks from every player while something is still keeping its chunk loaded (spawn chunks, a chunk loader, another player on a server), it now relocates to a fresh spot near someone rather than idling out of play. New relocateDistanceBlocks (0 disables). This never counts as a kill — no trophy, no 40-minute cooldown, and permadeath is not triggered. Note this was already handled for the ordinary case: walking far enough away unloads its chunk, and it has always respawned near you immediately when that happens.
• The Enraged boss lost its floating nametag. The red boss bar at the top of the screen says everything; a second label hanging in the air was just clutter. The name still appears in death messages.

v1.8.1 — all four builds

• Fixed: it gets through your doorways and down your corridors again. 🚪 A spider that came at you from a distance arrived large — and a large spider was invisible to its own tight-space sense, so it never knew to shrink. It would park outside the door, or wedge itself in a corridor ceiling, and stay there. The cause was a ratchet: the check that measures the space around the body looked downward from the body's middle, and on a body too big for the passage that middle sits above the ceiling — so the check found the ceiling, mistook it for the floor, and reported "plenty of room". Having grown too big to notice the corridor, it could never be told to shrink back down. It now measures from where its legs are standing, which works at any size: it sizes down to fit a passage no matter how big it arrives, and holds that size for the whole length instead of swelling up into the roof halfway through. 🕷️
• Big spiders still stride over low walls and one-block ditches exactly as before — only genuinely enclosing spaces hold them.
• NEW: SEVEN ADVANCEMENTS. 🏆 The hunt now keeps score. They live in their own tab, and none of them are the kind you get by accident:
  • Along Came a Spider — Meet the Netherite Octoarachnopod. It met you first, and as Coinmonke once put it, "ITS SO BIG!!!"
  • If It Bleeds, We Can Kill It — Find the Camo variant — or rather, notice that a piece of the scenery has been following you.
  • We Are Venom — Meet the warped tarantula. The Poison II is not a suggestion.
  • Don't Blink — Meet the Hunter. Don't turn your back, don't look away, and whatever you do, don't blink.
  • Eight Legs Later — Kill an Octoarachnopod. That buys you two Minecraft days of quiet. Spend them well.
  • I Have a Bad Feeling About This — Feed a netherite ingot to the spider that is made of netherite. What is the worst that could happen?
  • Rage Against the Machine (challenge) — Put down the Enraged one. It cost you an ingot and most of your health. It paid you back in blocks.
• CRITICAL, Fabric 1.20.1 only: the spider could not spawn at all. 💥 On that build the very first thing a leg does — look down for the ground — threw an error that took the whole server tick loop with it, so a spider appearing meant a crash. The cause was a Minecraft 1.20.1 API that quietly refuses the "no entity" ray-cast the mod was asking for; the Forge build papers over it, which is why only Fabric 1.20.1 was affected. The ground ray-cast is now done directly against block collision shapes and needs no such context on any version. If you tried the Fabric 1.20.1 build and it crashed, this was why.
• NEW: the netherite spider's LEG COUNT is configurable. 🦿 netheriteLegs, default 8 — the classic octopod, unchanged. The original mod shipped 2/4/6/8-legged bodies, and that idea is back as a live setting: anything from 1 to 16, with the body proportions interpolated to match, so 12 or 16 reads as a centipede and 4 as a crab. Only the netherite variant — camo, poison and hunter always have 8. Below 4 is deliberately experimental and behaves about how you'd expect: 3 limps, and 1 or 2 legs can't walk at all — the body just drags itself along the ground after you, which is horrible in the best way. Odd numbers add a leg on the centre line.
• NEW: the netherite spider's ARMOR is configurable. 🛡️ netheriteArmor (20), netheriteArmorToughness (12) and netheriteKnockbackResistance (0.4) were previously hardcoded to a full netherite suit. Set netheriteArmor and netheriteArmorToughness to 0 for a spider with no armor at all — it then takes weapon damage straight off its 350 HP and dies far faster. Bite damage was already per-variant and is unchanged (netheriteAttackDamageHearts and friends). Both leg count and armor apply when a spider SPAWNS, so they take effect on the next one.
• The POISON tarantula is now a fixed size. 🕸️ It used to swell and shrink with your distance like the others, and since the body rides higher as it grows, that read in-game as the spider bobbing up and down on the spot whenever you backed away — especially near water. It now holds one size, roughly player height (new poisonSize, default 1.0), which suits it far better anyway: a tarantula is an ambusher, not a siege engine. It still sizes down when it needs to — threading a doorway, or pouring itself into a squeeze hole — it just no longer has a distance-driven size to oscillate.

v1.8.0 — now on FOUR builds

• NEW BUILD: Fabric 1.20.1. 🧵 Fabric players on 1.20.1 finally get it — same spider, same simulation, the complete v1.8.0 feature set, verified booting on a real 1.20.1 server. That fills the last gap: Fabric and Forge/NeoForge, on both 1.20.1 and 1.21.1. Requires Fabric API + Fabric Language Kotlin, like the 1.21.1 Fabric build.

v1.8.0 — all builds

• Every variant now bites differently. ⚔️ The one shared damage number is gone — each spider hits with its own weight: Netherite 6 hearts, Camo 5, Hunter 4 (it hunts by taking your sight, not by force), Poison 3 plus its venom, and the Enraged boss 10. New keys netheriteAttackDamageHearts / camoAttackDamageHearts / hunterAttackDamageHearts (a customized attackDamageHearts carries over automatically).
• On armour: those are raw numbers — your armour has always reduced them, because the bite is an ordinary mob attack running vanilla's armour maths. For reference, what actually reaches you: the netherite bite lands 6 hearts unarmoured → ~3.8 in iron → ~1.9 in diamond → ~1.8 in netherite; the poison bite lands 3 → ~0.75 through full netherite; even the Enraged boss drops from 10 to ~3.6. Full kit is genuinely worth wearing, and the numbers above were left un-nerfed because armour already does that work — pre-reducing them would have made armoured players nearly immune. 🛡️

v1.7.0 — all three loaders

• NEW: the HUNTER takes your eyes. 🖤 The pitch-black stalker now blinds you when it gets close — within 16 blocks by default (hunterBlindnessRange) — for 30 seconds (hunterBlindnessSeconds). And it keeps re-applying it for as long as you stay in range: the blindness doesn't tick down while it's near you, so the only way to clear it is to genuinely get away from the thing. Everyone in range is blinded, not just its current quarry — standing next to the victim is not a safe seat. A creature that only moves when you aren't looking, in a world where you can't look. Set the range to 0 to turn it off. ☠️

❓ FAQ

The questions that come up again and again in the comments. If yours isn't here, ask — it may end up on this list.

Can I become the spider with Identity, Morph, or another transformation mod? No — and this is the one thing here that genuinely cannot be patched. Morph mods work by swapping in a mob's rendered model: a fixed rig of cubes and bones Minecraft already knows how to draw. This spider has no such model. The entity itself is invisible; what you see is a live inverse-kinematics simulation, solved every tick and drawn with dozens of independent vanilla BlockDisplay entities. There is no single "spider model" anywhere for a morph mod to find, capture or copy — its appearance exists only as the moment-to-moment output of a running simulation. Making it morphable would mean rebuilding it as an ordinary pre-rigged model, which throws away the procedural, ground-adapting movement that is the entire point of the mod. That's not a fix; it's a worse mod. This is architectural and permanent. The intended answer is to pilot it instead of wearing it — see below.

How do I ride it? Grab the creative-only Spider Tamer, right-click the spider to make it docile (it stops attacking, but still chases and grows), then right-click it empty-handed to climb on. All four movement keys work: W and S drive forward and back along your line of sight, A and D strafe across it, and the spider keeps facing wherever you look the whole time. Sneak to dismount. While ridden it settles to a stable, mount-friendly size. There's also /spider newinstance for a personal follower spider that just trails you around.

I killed it and got no netherite — is the drop broken? Almost certainly not: it's a coin flip by default… a.k.a 50/50 chance (netheriteDropChance, 0.5), so one kill is not a sample. Set it to 1.0 if you want a guaranteed drop. The trophy lands on the ground directly beneath the body rather than at the spider's centre — a giant's body rides 10–25 blocks up, so it used to fall from the sky and land far away. Two genuine bugs here were fixed long ago: kills deep underground now drop on the cave floor instead of the surface above, and "kill anything" weapons that zero your health directly (Avaritia's, for example) no longer skip the drop.

It spawns too fast / too slow, and my config looks ignored. spawnMinMinutes and spawnMaxMinutes govern the first spawn of a session only. After that, killing it earns you respawnAfterKillMinutes (40 = two Minecraft days), and switching Peaceful back off brings it in after peacefulExitSpawnMinutes (1 minute). Changes made with /spider config re-arm the running countdown immediately, crediting time already served. Also worth knowing: it charges at up to 8× speed, so it is usually seen far sooner than it spawned.

It never spawns at all. Two usual causes. On rough terrain, the safe-ground search can starve — raise spawnAngleAttempts. On a skyblock or void world, everything at the normal spawn distance is empty air; spawnCloseFallbackDistance (default 6) lets the search sweep inward as a last resort. And note that an existing config file keeps its old values when defaults change, so a long-running install may still be on old numbers — delete the file to regenerate it, or update the keys by hand.

It wandered off / it's a thousand blocks away. It finds its way back. If its chunk unloads it is replaced near a player immediately; if the chunk stays loaded (spawn chunks, a chunk loader, another player), it relocates once it has been further than relocateDistanceBlocks (192) from everyone for about ten seconds. There is still only ever one.

I beat it. Can it stay dead? Yes — set permadeath = true and it never returns in that world. The result is written into the world save, so it survives quitting, relogging and server restarts, and it's per-world, so a new world is a fresh hunt. Only genuine kills count: a Peaceful despawn or a chunk unload never robs you of the fight.

It's stuck, or sitting on my roof instead of coming inside. Fixed in v1.8.4 — it now recognises an ordinary room, shrinks early enough to fit through the door, and comes in rather than camping overhead. Earlier versions had a run of wall-climbing, doorway and corridor problems; all are resolved. If you still find it stuck somewhere, please report it with the layout — that's exactly how the last several got fixed.

Can I make it less terrifying? There is no cute mode, but hostileOnlyAtNight = true makes it ignore you in daylight like a vanilla spider, maxSize caps how large it grows, and chaseDistance controls how far away it notices you. Please read the arachnophobia warning at the top of this page before installing.

Does it work on a dedicated server? What about Quilt? Yes to servers — the entire simulation runs server-side, and only the loader requirements above matter. Quilt players should use the Fabric jar: Quilt Loader runs it directly, so no separate build exists or is needed.

Why is there only ever one spider? By design. It's a thing that hunts you, not a mob you farm.

---

🙏 Credits & license

Created by iR3DN4X. Based on TheCymaera/minecraft-spider by Heledron (YouTube @heledron).

This mod stands entirely on the shoulders of Heledron (TheCymaera/Cymaera), whose original procedural-spider plugin is the heart of everything you see here. All of the inverse-kinematics leg animation, gait, and BlockDisplay rendering brilliance is theirs. I just built a hostile-mob experience on top of it.

Please go support the original creator:

• 🔧 Original plugin (GitHub): https://github.com/TheCymaera/minecraft-spider
• 🎬 Demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hc9x1e85L0w
• 📺 Heledron's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@heledron

Custom license (per the original): free to use for commercial or non-commercial purposes; attribution appreciated but not required; do not resell without substantial changes. This is a free derivative with substantial changes.

📄 License

Copyright © iR3DN4X. ArachnoMod is source-available freeware: free to download and play, forever — but not open-source, and not free to re-use commercially. This license applies to all versions and loaders of the mod; the copy bundled with the latest release (LICENSE.md inside the jar) is the license in force.

ArachnoMod is a derivative of minecraft-spider by Heledron (TheCymaera), used with attribution under its original terms; those portions remain his. All remaining content not belonging to Mojang/Microsoft or the above is the property of iR3DN4X.

You MAY:

• Play the mod in any context, including on servers of any size.
• Feature it in videos, streams, and other media — monetized or not (that is not "commercial use" of the mod's assets).
• Include it in modpacks with acknowledgment, distributed per CurseForge's terms.
• Create and publish resource packs and language packs for it.
• Create add-on mods that depend on, extend, or interact with this mod. Prior contact is appreciated, not required — I'd love to see what you make: Private Message me on CurseForge: @ iR3DN4X
• Create non-commercial derivative works with credit — except ports (below).

You may NOT:

• Re-use this mod's assets or code commercially anywhere else.
• Port or re-release this mod for other Minecraft versions, loaders, platforms, games, or media — official ports are made by me and planned ahead. If you want one, ask.
• Rehost or redistribute the mod files outside CurseForge. If you downloaded this jar anywhere else, it may be modified or malicious — the only official source is this CurseForge page.

For anything not covered here, ask: @iR3DN4X.

Ported to NeoForge and turned into a hunting mob by iR3DN4X.

🎆 Supporters 🎆

• NetherySiloX — community contributor behind much of the v1.1.1 "Hunt Update": designed and prototyped the safe spawning system (no more void/water/mid-air spawns, SkyBlock-friendly ground scanning), the wander → alert → chase AI (the calm patrols, the freeze-and-stare moment, and the chase hysteresis that stopped the gait glitching at the detection edge), and the server-side command/config system that became /spider config — live in-game editing of every setting, including the every-sound-in-the-game step-sound picker. Thank you! 🕷️
• ggfelle aka @ vayne on Discord for helping with bug tests, and suggesting to bug-fix the Nether and Overworld, as well as letting the spider fit through 2x1 block holes/corridors. Thank you! 🕷️

If anyone finds any bugs/glitches/suggestions, please report them back to me in the comments, and thank you for downloading my mod!