Spider
neutralOurs, not the game's own: how a spider behaves. Same on Bedrock v1.26.40.05 for weight, health. Checked 2026-08-22, and here is how we check.
Added InOverview
A Spider is a neutral mob: it is not hostile on sight, and its own behaviour decides when that changes: hostile at night or in darkness, neutral in daylight (unless already aggro).
You will normally come across spiders in the Overworld, where they appear in all Overworld biomes.
Its defining trait is simple: hostile at night or in darkness, neutral in daylight (unless already aggro).
Stat-wise it sits at 16 health (8 hearts), dropping 5 experience on death.
Players have been encountering the Spider since the Classic 0.27 SURVIVAL TEST update.
One thing worth knowing: Bane of Arthropods deals extra damage to spiders.
The Spider sits in a useful middle ground, harmless if you respect it, but a real threat if you provoke it, which makes reading the situation important.
Damage by Difficulty
Spawning
In the wild, the Spider is generated in all Overworld biomes.
Because it appears across 52 different biomes, it is one of the easier mobs to track down, and heading to any of them should turn one up before long.
Spawns at light level 0 in the Overworld on solid blocks. Hostile at night, neutral during the day.
Pay attention to lighting: a light level of 0 is required, which is exactly what makes torch placement such an effective way to suppress or encourage these spawns.
Naturally spawned spiders will despawn over time when no player is nearby; naming one with a name tag or leading it away on a lead keeps it permanent.
Whether one leaves you alone is not up to you alone: hostile at night or in darkness, neutral in daylight (unless already aggro).
Badlands
Bamboo Jungle
Beach
Birch Forest
Cherry Grove
Cold Ocean
Dark Forest
Deep Cold Ocean
Deep Frozen Ocean
Deep Lukewarm Ocean
Deep Ocean
Desert
Dripstone Caves
Eroded Badlands
Flower Forest
Forest
Frozen Ocean
Frozen Peaks
Frozen River
Grove
Ice Spikes
Jagged Peaks
Jungle
Lukewarm Ocean
Lush Caves
Mangrove Swamp
Meadow
Ocean
Old Growth Birch Forest
Old Growth Pine Taiga
Old Growth Spruce Taiga
Pale Garden
Plains
River
Savanna
Savanna Plateau
Snowy Beach
Snowy Plains
Snowy Slopes
Snowy Taiga
Sparse Jungle
Stony Peaks
Stony Shore
Sunflower Plains
Swamp
Taiga
Warm Ocean
Windswept Forest
Windswept Gravelly Hills
Windswept Hills
Windswept Savanna
Wooded BadlandsWhere the Spider spawns
Badlands, Beach, Birch Forest and Cherry Grove are where it stands strongest: weight 100 on the monster list and 19.4% of it, arriving 4 at a time. There it shares the list with Creeper at 100, Skeleton at 100, Slime at 100, Zombie at 95 and Enderman at 10 and 2 more, 515 weight together, of which 100 is spider. The other 14 biomes on its list run from 19.3% down to 16.3%.
Drops
Killing a Spider produces the following loot:
Nothing here is guaranteed: a kill can give you 0 to 2 String and 1 Spider Eye.
You also collect 5 experience for every Spider you defeat.
These are well worth keeping. Can spawn as a Spider Jockey (skeleton rider).
With nothing guaranteed, output is swingy: over many kills the averages hold, but any single Spider may give you little, so farm in volume rather than expecting a jackpot each time.
| Item | Count | Chance | Conditions |
|---|---|---|---|
| String | 0 to 2 | not every kill | Looting III up to 5 |
| Spider Eye | 0 to 1 | not every kill | player kill, Looting III up to 4 |
Spider EyeIt is not the only source of Spider Eye: the cave spider drops 0 to 1 and the witch 0 to 2.
Spider attributes
| Attribute | Value |
|---|---|
 Size | 1.4 x 0.9 blocks |
 Eye height | 0.65 blocks |
 Tracking range | 8 chunks |
 Experience | 5 |
 Movement speed | 0.3 |
| Follow range | 16 blocks |
 Health | 16 points |
Where the Spider lands, it has company: the piglin on the same 16 health.
Spider: 15.15% of its category, rank 5 of 52
On 52 of the 66 biome lists (52 spawn entries in total), and 15.15% of every spawn the game puts in its monster group is a spider.
A spider averages 1 String a kill on the rolls Minecraft Java 26.2 makes for it, before Looting, which puts a full stack of 64 String at 64 kills. Next down is Spider Eye at 0.5 a kill, which is 128 spider kills to 64. 1 of those 2 rows (Spider Eye) only roll when a player lands the killing blow, so a spider killed by a fall or another mob averages 1 item instead of 1.5.
| Item | Average per kill |
|---|---|
 String | 1 |
1 situational row left out. How this average is worked out
| Weapon | Attack damage | Full swings | Swings per 64 String |
|---|---|---|---|
 golden sword, wooden sword | 4 | 4 | 256 |
 stone sword | 5 | 4 | 256 |
 iron sword | 6 | 3 | 192 |
 diamond sword, golden axe, wooden axe | 7 | 3 | 192 |
 netherite sword | 8 | 2 | 128 |
 diamond axe, iron axe, stone axe | 9 | 2 | 128 |
 netherite axe | 10 | 2 | 128 |
Coming the other way, a spider hit is 10% of a player's 20 health, 10 of them a full bar, all out of the spider's 2 damage on Normal. On Easy the same spider hit is 10%, on Hard 15%, so 10 hits against 7.
Behavior & Combat
Hostile at night or in darkness, neutral in daylight (unless already aggro). Can climb walls. Fits through 1-block gaps. 1% chance to spawn with a status effect.
At 0.3 it is 17th of 72 for speed, level with the ravager at 0.3.
It can hit you for 2 on Easy, 2 on Normal and 3 on Hard, while its own 16 health (8 hearts) determines how many blows it takes to kill.
When fighting back, remember it is weak to Fire and Bane of Arthropods enchantment.
A sword enchanted with Bane of Arthropods shortens the fight considerably against this mob.
The Spider cannot be bred, so the only way to get more is to find them spawning naturally in their home biomes.
As long as you avoid landing the first blow, you can usually go about your business near a Spider without trouble.
Spider commands
| Command | What it does |
|---|---|
| /summon minecraft:spider | Puts a spider on the block you are standing on. |
| /give @p minecraft:spider_spawn_egg | Hands you the spider spawn egg, so you can place spiders where you want them. |
| /kill @e[type=minecraft:spider] | Removes every spider that is loaded around you. |
Entity id minecraft:spider, spawn egg minecraft:spider_spawn_egg.
Spider farm
Everything about a spider farm follows the spider spawn rule. Spawns at light level 0 in the Overworld on solid blocks. Hostile at night, neutral during the day.
Badlands is where the spider has the biggest slice of the roll, 19.4% across the 52 lists the spider appears on, and that is the biome to build a spider farm in.
The game puts 4 spiders down per roll, so a wide spider floor beats a tall one.
Each kill is worth 5 experience and up to 2 string, or 5 with Looting III, which is the number to scale the spider farm against.
Spider version history
The spider goes back to Classic 0.27 SURVIVAL TEST, from before the game had numbered releases, which makes the spider one of the 8 oldest mobs on this site.
One other mob here came with it: the sheep. Of the 88 mobs we list, 0 were in the game before the spider and 80 arrived after it.
All of the spider data above is taken from Java 26.2, so it describes the spider as it is today.
What Spider sounds like
Turn subtitles on and every spider sound names itself in the corner of the screen. These are the 3 lines a spider can put there, and you can play any of them yourself with /playsound minecraft:entity.spider.ambient master @p.
| Sound | What you hear |
|---|---|
| entity.spider.ambient |  Spider hisses |
| entity.spider.hurt | Spider hurts |
| entity.spider.death | Spider dies |
Advancements that need Spider
2 advancements ask for spider by name, and each of them counts other mobs too.
- Monster HunterKill any hostile monster
- Monsters HuntedKill one of every hostile monster
