Tarantula

Tarantulas are hostile mobs that spawn in sandy biomes.

Appearance
Tarantulas seem to be based on the Mexican red-kneed tarantula, and are dark brown in color, with an orange-brown ring on their thorax, orange-brown bands on their legs and pedipalps, and shades of orange-brown on their head and abdomen, as well as 6 red eyes that eerily glow in the dark.

Behavior
Unlike the vanilla spiders, tarantulas are naturally hostile to players even in broad daylight. When attacking, they will crawl at players before leaping at them and dealing 1 heart (2 HP) of damage; while attacking, they may also climb walls in order to reliably catch up to players. Often times, they will also fire hairs from their body at players; these hairs do 3 hearts (6 HP) of damage and inflict Blindness for 1-3 seconds (depending on what difficulty the player is on). They will also attack Iron Golems.

History

 * 1.0.0:
 * Introduced.
 * 9.0.0:
 * Now rotates when climbing up walls.

Trivia

 * Surprisingly enough, tarantulas do much more damage with their hairs than with their bites, making them more effective at ranged combat than at melee combat.
 * Due to a possible bug, tarantulas often struggle to fight targets in melee combat. After intially leaping at a target and dealing damage, they will either stand in place or attempt to reposition themselves and harmlessly push their target around, only occasionally doing melee damage; the most reliable way of dealing damage they have is firing hairs at point-blank range.