Silkweaver

You are a spider. The forest is yours to string, and the light is already moving.

Silkweaver is a spider web building game about a single day in a forest: nine waves, sunrise to full dark. Between waves you spin silk from branch to branch. During a wave you feel the web move, and you run for whatever hit it before it tears free.

Build a web that is actually yours

Drag from branch to branch and your spider walks the line, laying silk as she goes. Nothing snaps into place; she has to get there. Anchor to bark, vine, stone and leaf, or begin a new strand from a line you already spun. The web grows the way a real one does — asymmetric, load-bearing, and yours.

Silk is a resource. Your glands hold only so much and refill while you rest, so a sprawling web at sunrise can leave you with nothing to patch a hole at dusk.

Four silks, four jobs

• Structural — cheap and strong, the frame that carries everything else
• Sticky — holds prey far longer, but tears under real weight
• Elastic — stretches and throws light insects back into the web
• Trap — grips hardest of all, and costs the most to lay

Eight kinds of prey

Houseflies and mosquitoes are easy meals. Moths chase the light. Beetles hit hard enough to snap a weak strand outright. Butterflies drift in on the wind. Dragonflies are quick enough to bounce straight off. Wasps cut your silk on purpose. And the Golden Beetle is worth the entire wave, if you can hold onto it.

Nothing waits for you. A bug that lands begins to struggle, and every second works it looser. Run it down and wrap it. Too slow and it tears out and takes your web with it — and a bird may drop in for whatever is left.

The weather turns on you

Gusts bow your strands. Drizzle loads them with water. Thick fog hides the far side of the web. And night arrives on the ninth wave whether you are ready for it or not.

Grow between runs

Everything you catch is experience. Your spider moults into new instars, and growth points go permanently into legs, glands, spinnerets, senses and fangs. Between waves you draft perks: stronger silk, a stickier web, wind and rain resistance, baby spiders that help you wrap, a scent that draws rare prey.

Five spiders, none of them stronger

Garden Orbweaver, Dew Weaver, Nightstalker, Trapdoor Ambusher, Golden Silk Orbweaver. Each is a sidegrade with a real trait and a real drawback, so the spider you weave as is a playstyle and never an advantage.

Drawn, not photographed

Every strand, leg, wing and leaf is vector art drawn in code. Silk sags under real weight and sways in real wind, and no two webs ever look the same. Portrait, one hand, and no timer telling you to come back tomorrow.

A field guide in the game keeps your notes on every insect, silk and perk you have met.