Netherite Octoarachnopod (The Netherite Spider)

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. 🕷️