How to search
Every box is one term, and a seed must satisfy all of them. Each example below is a link — follow it to see what it returns on this build.
Items
An item is named by its type, not by how it reads on the floor: potion:haste, where the first half is the base type and the second is the bare sub type. Type is the stable half — a display name carries enchantment, brand and artefact epithet, so searching it finds one seed rather than the thousands that hold the same item.
| term | what it asks |
|---|---|
| potion:haste | a potion of haste, anywhere on the extracted floors |
| wand:digging | a wand of digging |
| scroll:acquirement | a scroll of acquirement |
| weapon:executioner's axe | an executioner's axe — a sub type can contain spaces and apostrophes |
Floor or shop
A price is the only thing separating shop stock from loot lying on the ground. An unqualified item term matches either; floor and shop ask for one side of that split. Prefer the floor form when the point is that you can pick the thing up — a shop item costs gold a character on D:2 does not have.
| term | what it asks |
|---|---|
| potion:haste | a potion of haste on the floor or behind a counter |
| floor potion:haste | one lying on the ground, not for sale |
| shop wand:digging | a wand of digging in a shop's stock |
Why a floor search can return fewer seeds than you expect
The split applies to counts as well. A seed with two potions on the ground and a third in a shop satisfies 3x potion:haste but not 3x floor potion:haste, which wants three you can walk over. So a floor search is not the same as running the plain search and ignoring the shop hits — it can match strictly fewer seeds, and that is the question it is asking.
How many, and how deep
Two affixes qualify any term. 3x in front sets a minimum count, and it counts items rather than piles — a single stack of three satisfies it. by D:5 on the end caps how deep the match may sit, counted in the order levels are generated, so a Temple hanging off D:4 is within by D:5 even though it is not a D level.
| term | what it asks |
|---|---|
| 3x potion:haste | at least three potions of haste |
| potion:haste by D:5 | one no deeper than D:5 |
| 3x floor potion:haste by D:5 | three on the ground, all within the first five floors |
| altar_trog by D:4 | an altar of Trog early enough to matter for a starting character |
Features
Altars, branch entrances and shops are named in crawl's own vocabulary, with no prefix. The blank term box suggests them as you type.
| term | what it asks |
|---|---|
| altar_trog | an altar of Trog |
| enter_shop | any shop at all |
| enter_lair | the Lair entrance |
| enter_sewer | a sewer portal |
Artefacts, uniques and names
An unrand's display name carries a varying enchantment prefix, so name~ matches a substring of it. It reaches only the names the corpus stores whole — artefacts, unrands and monsters — because an ordinary item's name is rebuilt from its type rather than kept. For anything with a type, the type is both faster and more accurate.
| term | what it asks |
|---|---|
| artefact | any artefact, randart or unrand |
| name~Throatcutter | the unrand, at whatever enchantment it rolled |
| unique:Sigmund | Sigmund, generated somewhere in the extracted floors |
Why name~ does not find a potion of haste
The corpus stores a name only where it cannot rebuild one from the other columns, which is 92% of rows saved. A potion of haste has no stored name — it is reconstructed from potion and haste when it is shown to you. So name~potion of haste matches nothing, and potion:haste is the term for that question — as it always was, being an indexed lookup on the type rather than a substring scan.
Combining terms
Every box is another condition the seed must meet. There is no "or": two alternatives are two searches whose results you can compare, which keeps each one a set intersection an index can answer quickly.
| term | what it asks |
|---|---|
| altar_trog by D:4 + 3x floor potion:haste | an early Trog altar and three potions of haste on the ground |
| enter_lair by D:8 + artefact by D:5 | the Lair within eight floors and an artefact in the first five |
| shop wand:digging + altar_okawaru | a wand of digging for sale, and somewhere to swear to Okawaru |
What a search cannot tell you
A seed is only searched as deep as it has been extracted, and most are extracted to D:8. "No Wyrmbane here" and "not searched deep enough to know" are different answers, and a term matching nothing may be either. Each seed's page says how deep it went, and offers to go deeper.