Basic Information
Spider silk is silk produced by spiders.
Like other forms of silk it is very strong for its mass and, in many cases, has good elastic properties - however it is not a particularly efficient industrial resource given that most spiders coat their silk with adhesive and spin it into webs (although there are spiders who use it for tripwires or other forms of engineering), also spiders tend to be solitary carnivores and therefore hard to farm.
Historically balls of spider web were used to dress wounds - this turns out to have some scientific basis given that residual glue on the web is rich in vitamin K which is important in blood clotting. Synthetic spider silk remains an objective for materials science and there is also work in progress to produce it from other species by genetic engineering.
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Game and Story Use
- Besides the synthetic silk, biothaumaturgy or some form of biotechnology might create a modified spider that could spin web on an industrial process - probably looking more like a tick with vestigial limbs and probably fed directly from a large animal like a cow or a bag of pureed meat.
