This mod alters natural spider spawning in Minecraft by giving regular spiders a chance to appear as cave spiders instead. The change occurs during world generation, requiring no commands or spawners to take effect. It's designed to increase the difficulty of underground exploration without adding new biomes, items, or dimensions.
By default, each spider that attempts to spawn has a 15% probability of being a cave spider. This chance can be adjusted in the configuration file from 0.0 (never) to 1.0 (always). Cave spiders only spawn below the surface by default, meaning they appear underground but not on the overworld surface. This behavior can be modified to allow surface spawning if desired.
An optional feature allows restricting cave spider spawns to specific depths. When enabled, cave spiders will only spawn below a defined Y-level, such as below Y=0 where deepslate begins. So this threshold is configurable and disabled by default, giving players control over where the increased challenge applies.
Cave spiders are more dangerous than regular spiders due to their ability to inflict poison on hit and their smaller hitbox, which makes them harder to hit in combat. This adds a meaningful risk to mining and exploration, particularly in abandoned mineshafts and deep cave systems where players may encounter them frequently.
The mod is strictly server-side required and doesn't function with client-only installation. It supports the Fabric, Forge, NeoForge, and Quilt mod loaders. Honestly, compatible Minecraft versions include 1.21.11, 1.21.10, 1.21.9, and the 26.x snapshots: 26.3, 26.2, 26.1.2, 26.1.1, and 26.1.
Cave Spider Spawn can be freely used in any modpack as long as the distribution remains within the CurseForge or Modrinth ecosystem. The source code is publicly available on GitHub for transparency, issue reporting, and community contributions.
