Entry 007 - Spider (umbraculum tacebo) and Cave Spider (latet araneae)
It is advised that, at this moment, none venture into a cave without light and a sword imbued with the Bane of Arthropods. Any kind will do. Spiders are nasty animals. Descended from gigantic ancestors, who thankfully were long gone before users emerged onto Minecraftia, the Spiders of today are vicious and (regretfully) carnivorous.
Each Spider is blessed with four pairs of legs (eight legs total), which they use to scuttle across the ground at tremendous speeds. These legs, as long as a Minecraftian's, are also adept at jumping and swimming. Truly, Spiders are the top natural predator. An adult spider can jump a height of five or even six feet in the air, and from a running jump can make it to about twelve. The ends of their legs are covered in a rough patch of scales which work rather like scales; they will be smooth one way but bumpy and sharp the other way. These patches help them climb walls, but not ceilings. Ceilings are their weakness. If a user builds a roof on his or her house that extends a meter more in either direction from the walls, then he or she is a smart user and will most likely live quite a long time.
Spiders go through three stages in their lives, four if you consider a female Spider becoming a queen. First, they are hatched from black shelled and red spotted eggs, usually in a cave or some other sheltered place. Spiders are extra ferocious in caves, and this is because the spider is usually a mother protecting her young... not to say they are not vicious outside the caves. The second phase of development is when the Spider reaches the age of two weeks. Then it grows frail legs in the space of one night and becomes a juvenile Spider. Its body is still soft, however, and about 25% of all Spider young die within their first month of juvenility. Finally, after two and a half months, the juvenile goes into a stasis that lasts for two days, encasing themselves in webbing; after these two days are over, they emerge as a fully-grown and matured Spider. It is also inside this cocoon of webbing that the Spider's sex is chosen, and there is a 1% chance in a female Spider that a gene will activate that causes her to become a queen.
Being a queen means that the female Spider, instead of laying one egg at a time, lays clutches of a dozen. This can happen weekly or even daily, depending on the individual Spider in question. Queen Spiders can live for a very long time. In fact, one Spider queen who lived in the mountains was found upon her death to have lived to the ripe old age of one thousand and thirty-nine.
Cave Spiders are the more reclusive variety of Spider. They are about a third smaller than a normal Spider. Unlike their more outgoing relatives, they live inside environments deep underground that match their tastes. You see, Cave Spiders have a natural deficiency in the stuff that allows them to spin webs; without webs they cannot catch bats, and they will slowly die of starvation. So they have to eat wood, but not just any wood. No, the Cave Spiders have to eat wood that is cut by the hand of user or Testificate, for the planks are made of the part of the tree that is the most laden with the silk-making protein: the inside of the trunk. Bark is hard to gnaw through, especially with the Cave Spider's primitive jaws.
Cave Spiders often move into mineshafts that the more aboveground species have abandoned. But when they cannot find one that has been left to nature, they resort to hostile takeovers. And their primary weapon is the deadly toxin found in their fangs...
A note from the editor: Please, professor. You're scaring the kiddies.