Ikusa and the BDO combat log toolkit: a 2026 officer's guide

Ikusa is the open-source BDO combat log analyzer that quietly powers most serious PvP guilds' post-war analysis. If you've ever seen a screenshot in a guild Discord showing per-player damage dealt, kills, deaths, and class breakdowns from a node war, it almost certainly came out of Ikusa or one of its forks.

What Ikusa is, what it actually captures, the alternatives, and what officers do with the output once they have it.

What Ikusa is

Ikusa is a packet sniffer + log parser specifically built for Black Desert Online. It listens to network traffic between your client and the BDO server, decodes the combat-relevant packets, and produces a structured log of every kill and death involving you or anyone in your visual range during the captured session.

Critical clarification: Ikusa runs on ONE PC and captures what THAT PC sees. It's not a server-wide log — it's the killfeed from your character's perspective. To get a complete picture of a 50v50 node war, you need multiple guild members running it, then merge the captures (which is exactly what the analysis layer is for).

Output format is .pcap (raw packet capture) and a JSON-ish parsed log. The parsed log is what humans look at; the .pcap is what re-parsers consume if you want different aggregations later.

What it captures

Per killfeed event:

• Killer family name + class
• Victim family name + class
• Killer guild + alliance
• Victim guild + alliance
• Timestamp (millisecond precision)
• Whether it was a melee/ranged kill (when the packet carries the indicator)

What it does NOT capture: damage dealt to non-fatal targets, healing, buffs, exact ability used. It's a kill log, not a Recount-style damage meter. This is by design — the BDO server doesn't broadcast detailed damage numbers to non-victim clients, so no client-side tool can reconstruct them.

Setting it up

Three pieces: (1) Npcap (Windows packet capture driver), (2) Ikusa itself (the binary that listens), and (3) the analysis layer (whatever consumes the output). Most guilds use the original Ikusa from GitHub. There are forks; the differences are mostly in UI polish and which BDO patches they've kept up with.

Walkthrough at the highest level — your guild should have a documented internal version because patch numbers move:

1. Install Npcap from the Wireshark site. Default install settings work; tick the WinPcap-API-compatibility option if you have older tools.

2. Download the latest Ikusa release. Place the binary in a folder you have write access to (it writes logs alongside the binary).

3. Run Ikusa as administrator (packet capture requires it). Pick your network interface — usually the one BDO is using; if unsure, pick the one with the most outgoing traffic when BDO is running.

4. Start capture before war begins. Stop capture after war ends. The logs land in a configurable folder.

5. Open the resulting log in Ikusa's analysis UI or upload it to whatever tool your guild uses for aggregated breakdowns.

Alternatives in 2026

Ikusa is the original; what's grown around it:

Ikusa forks

Multiple forks exist on GitHub — most are bug fixes for specific patches that the original maintainer hasn't merged. If the official build stops parsing post-patch, check for a fork that's caught up. Forks generally don't add features; they fix what BDO broke.

CoGM Logger

An Ikusa-derived capture tool with a tighter UI and direct integration into a guild-wide analysis platform. Captures the same .pcap data; the analysis layer aggregates across multiple guild members' captures so you can see the platoon-wide picture instead of one player's view at a time. Bundles a dead-zone analyzer for spotting capture gaps and a built-in pcap-capture UI so officers don't need to set up Wireshark separately.

Manual Discord killfeed

Some guilds skip the packet capture and just have officers screenshot the in-game killfeed and OCR the text. This works for small samples but doesn't scale — the in-game killfeed scrolls fast during heavy fighting and you'll miss kills. It's also brittle: BDO occasionally tweaks the killfeed format and breaks any OCR pipeline tuned to the previous one.

In-game evidence (no tools)

Officer pulls death recap from members' UI after war. This is what guilds do before they discover Ikusa. It's labor-intensive and incomplete — you only get data on kills involving people who report.

Merging multi-PC captures

Ikusa logs are per-client. To get the full war you need to merge logs from multiple guild members. The merge logic:

• Deduplicate kills by (timestamp ± 500ms, killer name, victim name). Two of your members both saw the same kill — count it once, not twice.
• Account for line-of-sight gaps. Kills in a deep node interior may only be seen by one or two of your players inside; backline players' captures will miss them entirely. The merge fills the gap by trusting whoever did see it.
• Resolve I/l ambiguity in family names. BDO's font makes capital-i and lowercase-l visually identical; the packet usually has the canonical bytes but parsers occasionally render one as the other. Normalize during merge so you don't double-count.

Doing this by hand is miserable. The reason guilds gravitate to a server-side analysis tool is exactly this — the merge logic happens once, on upload, instead of in a spreadsheet for the next two hours.

What officers do with the data

Three workflows that pay for the time spent capturing:

1. Per-member performance review

Every member gets a scorecard: kills, deaths, K/D, kills per minute when alive, who killed them most, who they killed most. This surfaces members who are pulling weight (high kill count, low death count, killing high-value enemy classes) and members who aren't (high death count, repeatedly dying to the same enemy without ever killing them back).

Used right, this informs slotting decisions. Used wrong, it becomes a stick to hit underperformers with — which is corrosive. The best guilds use the data privately with the member to identify a coaching opportunity, not in a public officer channel as a callout.

2. Enemy guild scouting

Aggregated across multiple wars against the same enemy, the data shows who their carries are, which classes lead their kill chart, and who tends to die early. Going into next week's rematch you know which two players to focus down, which classes to anti-comp, and which back-line members are safe to ignore.

3. Tactical post-mortems

Combined with timestamps, the kill log shows the war's narrative: where the engagement happened, who died first, when the cannon team went down, which 3-minute window your guild lost the fight. Officers walk through this with the platoon to identify the specific moment that decided the war — almost always more useful than 'we lost because they had more cannons.'

How to start

Get one capture working first. Pick one tech-comfortable member (probably you), follow the Ikusa setup, capture next node war, and produce one scorecard for the guild. The reaction tells you whether to invest in the full multi-capture + merge workflow.

Most guilds run the captures from 2-3 reliable members per war and merge centrally. More than 5 captures per war hits diminishing returns — overlap goes way up and you're just deduplicating more events for the same total information.

If you want the merge + analysis layer pre-built rather than building it yourself, CoGM ingests Ikusa-format combat logs — upload the .pcap from one or more captures and get a guild-wide breakdown with enemy-guild attribution, per-member scorecards, and the timeline view officers actually use for post-mortems. Free tier handles the upload + basic analysis; the PvP analytics layer is on the paid tier.