Welcome to Crawl Crawler
What this site is, where the data comes from, and the fastest way to get something useful out of it.
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is turn-based, and every finished game writes a morgue file that records the whole run: the character, every skill level, every spell, every branch and when it was entered, every item picked up. Most games throw that kind of detail away. Crawl has decades of it sitting on public servers. Crawl Crawler is a proof of concept for what you can do with it.
The data
The core dataset is win streaks. I crawled every game listed on CAO's streak page, fetched the morgues that were still available, and parsed them into a database: just over 40,000 games, every one of them either a win inside a streak of two or more, or the game that ended one. That selection is the point. Streakers are consistent, high-level players, so their games are unusually good at showing how winning characters are actually built. The streak-breaking losses are just as instructive, because they show where strong players still die.
Two warnings. Parsing morgue files is genuinely hard, the format has changed across fifteen years of versions, and the parser is far from perfect, so expect data errors, especially before 0.20. And this is a hobby project on a small deployment: it may be slow, and it may be down.
The five tools
Streak Analytics is the main event. Filter the games by species, background, god, version, rune count, or final skill levels, then look at the result five ways: as a list of games, as a grouped breakdown you can pivot, as trends across versions, as a skill-training heatmap, or as a spell list. For instance, here are the skills Minotaur Berserkers trained and when. Minotaur Berserker skills
Morgue / Character Viewer parses any morgue or in-progress character dump from a supported server and lays it out: overview, skills over time, equipment, and dungeon progression. Here is the highest-scoring win in the streak set, a 15-rune Gnoll Air Elementalist of Cheibriados. Open that morgue
Combo Records is the CAO combo high-score table made sortable and filterable, with removed species and backgrounds marked. The Minotaur Berserker record
Player Summary reads a player's public scoring page and shows their wins over time, streaks and combo coverage. The most prolific streaker
The Appeal is three proposals for the DCSS developer community about making this kind of data easier to work with. If you only read one page besides this one, make it that one.
How to use it
Start from a question, not a page. The home page and every page's guide (the pulsing question mark in the header) open with example questions, each linked to the view that answers it. Click one, then change the filters until it answers your question instead.
Everything you set is in the page URL: the filters, the tab, the grouping. The Copy link button on each page hands that exact view to someone else, or to future you. A finding is a link.
If something looks wrong, it may well be. Open an issue on GitHub with the link, and the morgue URL if there is one. The parser gets better one broken morgue at a time.
What this blog is for
Short posts that each answer one question with the tool, every number linked to the live view that produced it, so you can check the claim and push it further. The first one is about what winning characters are wearing when they win.