Dwarf Fortress - Cave Spider / F.B. Silk Farm

This Guide teaches you how to set up a silk farm using a Giant Cave Spider or Forgotten Beast.

Spider and Silk

You can entirely avoid the farm by trading with caravans and setting aside some silk by forbidding it in a small silk stockpile behind a locked door for a strange mood. You get lot of this in caravans and even by just walking around in caverns

So…. why to make this set-up? if you see a lot of webbed dead bodies in the caverns or silk in abnormal amounts, this is a good opportunity to get a lot of free silk. Silk then can be made into a lot of clothes, satisfying the need of the dwarves to acquire objects and then you provide them with regular supply of silk clothes. Now the problem with this is the need of a Giant Cave Spider. The acquisition of it. Or you can do this the hard and one time way using a Forgotten beast that can be trapped and used as a spitter.

You use the cave Spider for silk webs or the forgotten beast. Now once a forgotten beast is trapped, it cannot be let out. A spider can be caged in again in case you need maintenance.

Now there are many designs…

Easy simple direct dwarf spitter farm. ( works just fine)
A tamed spider that spits at threats.(I have not tested this, but considering what the spider thinks is a threat, it will spit).
A forgotten beast that spits at anything it sees. (works fine).
The small vermin cave spider farm.( I have yet to try this method in detail).
Small farm.
Big Farm.
Bulk production automatic farm.

Now let us directly go to the designs to make this guide much compact.

Design and Layouts

I will show the ideal representation:

Easy simple direct dwarf spitter farm
Also applicable to:
A tamed spider that spits at threats
And
A forgotten beast that spits at anything it sees

How some advanced and little complex layout and design fundamentals. This layout is applicable and is from the forgotten beast guide, so don’t take it in depth, just that the details and all can be applicable as per the need:

Now the last line says, do not tame the spider, but honestly there is an alternative to that. That being you throw the bait in there as a hostile entity. That entity will trigger the spitter.

Now we move to the more advanced designs… until now we assumed that the design was that a dwarf or something just stands in front of the spider and it spits until the bridge in front of it is raised but honestly that design is good for small needs but it seems quite crude and barbaric to a high extent with respect to the dwarven standards.

Here would be a better design that can come under the categories of:

Small farm and Big Farm