Netherite Octoarachnopod (The Netherite Spider)

v1.8.3 (latest) — 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 any more. 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 their 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. 🛡️