Blog · 2026-09-26 · updated 2026-10-22
How to get better at Krillion: strategy, tips and a two-week practice plan
Most people play Krillion the way they play a pub quiz: hear the prompt, say the first true thing, move on. That gets you a 150-point dive and a Plankton badge. The players who reach the abyss every day aren't smarter; they have a routine for the 25 seconds and a few reliable places to look for an answer other people won't give. This guide is that routine, written down, with real prompts from the first 51 daily dives on this site as examples.
One honest note before the tactics: the original Krillion grades answers by what its own players typed. Our tiers are editorial estimates (how we make them is on the about page). The psychology below is the same in both games; the exact tier of any one answer can differ.
What "rare" actually measures
Rarity isn't obscurity. It is a measure of how many other players would give the same answer, and that is driven by one thing: what comes to mind first. When a prompt says "name a country in South America", Brazil arrives before you have finished reading. So does it for everyone else, which is why Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Peru and Chile are all Plankton (10 points) on that prompt, while Guyana is Rare and Suriname is the One in a Krillion.
That has a practical consequence. You don't need to know more than other players. You need to notice which answers everyone is about to type and type a different one. A correct, moderately well-known answer that most people simply don't reach for is usually worth more than a genuinely obscure one, because obscure answers are also the ones most likely to be missing from the bank.
The scoring you are playing against
- Five tiers: Plankton 10, Schooler 30, Rare 60, Deep Cut 85, One in a Krillion 100. Every prompt has exactly one 100-point answer.
- Seven rounds, 700 maximum. Every point is ten metres of depth. A dive under 150 is Plankton; 151 to 250 Schooler; 251 to 350 Rare; 351 to 449 Deep Cut; 450 and up is One in a Krillion territory, past the abyssal plain.
- A miss is zero. Seven Plankton answers (70 points) beat four Deep Cuts and three misses (340 points)? No, they don't, but seven Schoolers (210) beat two Deep Cuts and five misses (170). The dive is won by never scoring zero, not by chasing stars.
- Hints discount, they don't void. A hint-rescued 60-point answer is worth 54, 45 or 33 depending on how many hints you flipped. All three beat a miss by a lot and beat a Plankton by a little.
So the target for a strong dive is simple: seven answers of 30 or better, with two or three of them 60 or better. That is 300 to 400 points, the midnight zone, without ever gambling on the star.
A routine for the 25 seconds
The clock is the real opponent. Here is a split that works once it becomes habit:
- Preview (the 3 seconds before the clock). Don't think of answers yet. Decide what kind of prompt this is: a closed list (countries using the euro, big cats, racket sports) or an open field (street foods, cartoon animals, words ending in -tion). Closed lists have small banks, so your clever answer may not exist; open fields have huge banks where the first ten answers are all Plankton.
- 0 to 5 seconds: let the first answer go. It will arrive on its own. Notice it, label it "everyone's answer", and don't type it. On an open field this one move takes you from 10 points to 30 or 60.
- 5 to 15 seconds: pick a lane and look there. One of the seven lanes below. Don't scan the whole world; scan one region, one decade, one sub-type. You will find something in ten seconds if you look in a small place.
- 15 to 20 seconds: commit. Type it. Wrong guesses cost nothing on this site, so if it is rejected you still have five seconds for your backup.
- 20 to 25 seconds: safety. If nothing has landed, type the obvious answer. Ten points. Never let the round end at zero while you are still searching.
On a closed-list prompt, compress the whole thing: skip step 3, take the second or third item on the list, done in eight seconds. Day 35's "Name a country in Central America" has only seven accepted answers; Panama and Costa Rica are Plankton, El Salvador is a Deep Cut, Belize is the star. There is nowhere to be clever, just somewhere to be second.
Seven lanes to a rarer answer
These are the places rare answers reliably hide. Pick one per round, not all seven.
1. Move region
Whatever region the prompt makes you picture, answer from a different one. "Name a Mexican dish": tacos, burritos and guacamole are Plankton; mole and carnitas are Rare; huevos rancheros is a Deep Cut. "Name a street food": hot dogs and pretzels are Plankton, samosa is Rare, jianbing and roujiamo are Deep Cuts. The further from the default postcard, the deeper you go, as long as the answer is still well known somewhere.
2. Move era
Prompts about people, films and music default to the last twenty years. Go earlier. "Name an actor who has won Best Actor": DiCaprio, Washington and Hanks are Plankton; Brando and De Niro are Schoolers; Emil Jannings and Warner Baxter, the first two winners, are Deep Cuts. One step back in time is usually worth a tier.
3. Name the supporting cast
For characters, songs, members of a group and products of a company, the lead is Plankton and the second-billed is Rare. "Name a cartoon animal": Mickey Mouse, SpongeBob and Bugs Bunny are Plankton; Simba and the Pink Panther are Rare; Sylvester and Speedy Gonzales are Deep Cuts. Everyone remembers the hero. Fewer people reach for the sidekick.
4. Go one level more specific
If the prompt accepts a general answer, a precise version of it is often a tier deeper. "Name an animal that lives in the ocean": whale is Plankton; blue whale and humpback whale are Deep Cuts. "Name a sci-fi TV series": Star Trek is Plankton; Star Trek: The Next Generation is a Schooler. The specific name is just as correct and far less typed.
5. Switch sub-type
Most prompts have a dominant sub-type that soaks up the Plankton. "Name a type of nut": peanut, almond and walnut are the snack-bowl nuts, all Plankton; pine nut and acorn are Rare; beechnut and butternut are Deep Cuts. "Name a sport played with a racket or paddle": the three Olympic ones are Plankton; racquetball and padel are Schoolers; real tennis and platform tennis are Rare. Ask "what's the other kind of this?" and answer with that kind.
6. Use the longer word
On vocabulary prompts the short, common word is Plankton and the longer synonym is deeper. "A word that means to run": sprint, jog and dash are Plankton; scramble is a Deep Cut. "A word that means to laugh": chuckle and giggle are Plankton; chortle and cackle are Schoolers; cachinnate is a Deep Cut. Think of the word you would use in writing but not in speech.
7. Take the brand nobody says out loud
Brand prompts are dominated by two or three giants. "Name a tech company": Apple, Google and Microsoft are Plankton; Oracle and Cisco are Rare; HP and Adobe are Deep Cuts. "Name an energy drink": Red Bull and Monster are Plankton; NOS is a Schooler; Guru and Hiball are Deep Cuts. The companies you know exist but have never bought from are the ones to type.
Category by category
Across the first 51 daily dives (357 prompts), the average bank has about 76 accepted answers, but the spread is enormous: a handful of prompts accept fewer than a dozen answers, and 219 of them accept sixty or more. Each category has its own shape.
| Category | Typical bank | What works |
|---|---|---|
| Geography | About 37 answers, often far fewer | Mostly closed lists (members of a bloc, countries on a continent). Be second or third, not clever. Micro-states and overlooked members carry the Deep Cuts: Monaco and San Marino on "uses the euro". |
| Animals & Nature | About 86 | Open fields. Go specific (a named species instead of a family) or go to a different habitat than the prompt suggests. |
| Food & Drink | About 75 | Move region. Every cuisine prompt has one postcard country and a dozen others nobody pictures. |
| Movies & TV | About 92 | Move era and name the supporting cast. Franchise prompts reward the specific instalment over the franchise name. |
| Music, Sports & Games | About 91 | Move era for people, switch sub-type for sports. The second-most-famous variant of a sport is usually a Schooler. |
| Brands & Things | About 67 | Name the company you have heard of but never used. Avoid inventing a brand; small banks here reject guesses often. |
| Words & Knowledge | About 81, up to 274 on letter prompts | Use the longer or more formal word. On letter-pattern prompts the bank is huge, so almost anything correct beyond the first ten is at least a Schooler. |
If one of these rows is where your dives keep dying, the category dives give you seven prompts from that subject alone, and your logbook keeps a best score per category so you can see the weak one.
The traps
- Too clever for the bank. The rarest answer you know may simply not be in the list, especially on closed-list prompts. If a reach is rejected, don't spend ten more seconds defending it; drop one level and type a known answer.
- Spelling. Small typos get a "did you mean" check and plurals, accents and articles are forgiven, but a badly mangled name is a miss. When you are unsure of a spelling, prefer the answer you can spell.
- The category drift. "Name a freshwater fish" will not take tuna. Rare answers are tempting precisely because you half-remember them; double-check that they actually satisfy the prompt.
- Chasing the star. The 100-point answer is one specific entry (Nepal for "flag contains red", Vatican City for "uses the euro", Krating Daeng for "energy drink"). You will hit it sometimes by following the lanes above. Guessing for it blind is how dives end at zero.
- Freezing on the clock. If the first fifteen seconds produce nothing, you are scanning too wide. Pick a smaller place to look, or take the Plankton and move on. One ten-point round does not ruin a dive; one zero does.
When to take a hint
If the clock runs out you can flip up to three hints on a single 60-point answer: the first letter, then more letters, then the answer itself. Each flip buys fifteen seconds and costs 10%, 25% or 45% of the points, so the floor is 54, 45 or 33. The maths says: when you truly blank, flip the first hint immediately, read the letter, and let your memory finish the word. Fifty-four points is a Rare-tier result rescued from nothing. Flipping all three is still 33, which beats both a miss and a Plankton. The only time to avoid hints is in Endless, where a hint also costs one of your three air tanks.
A two-week practice plan
You can't get better at Krillion by playing one dive a day; you get better by seeing a lot of banks. This is roughly 15 minutes a day.
- Days 1 to 3: read the reveals. Play the daily, then open the full answer list for every prompt and look at where the 60s and 85s sit relative to the answers you thought of. Do the same in the archive for two past days. You are calibrating how big banks are.
- Days 4 to 7: one lane per day. In Endless, pick a single lane (move region, move era, supporting cast) and use only that one for the whole session, even when it feels forced. By the end of the week each lane is a reflex instead of an idea.
- Days 8 to 11: fix the weak category. Check the logbook for your lowest category best and run that category dive daily. Read every reveal.
- Days 12 to 14: play for a clean dive. Daily plus one Endless run with a single rule: no zeros. Seven answers of 30 or more. If you can do that three days running you are a 300-point player, and the Deep Cuts start arriving on their own.
Does this carry over to krillion.io?
Yes, the thinking does. The original scores by real player counts, so its tiers are more precise than ours, and its exact bank for any prompt is its own. But "skip the first answer", "move region", "name the supporting cast" and "never score zero" are about how people's memories work, not about any one answer list. Practise the habits here, and bring them to your daily dive.
Today's dive is on the home page; the full tier tables are on scoring, and the rules with examples are on how to play.