How Krillion scoring works

Short answer: every accepted answer is scored by rarity. The less common your valid answer, the deeper your dive goes; the most obvious answers barely count. Each prompt also hides a featured “Krillion” gem answer.

Rare beats obvious

Krillion rewards answers that are both correct and uncommon. Naming the first thing everyone thinks of is safe but scores very little. A valid answer that few players reach for scores much more, and your total is shown as how deep you have dived.

The six answer tiers

• 🫧 Plankton — 10 points. The answer everyone blurts out.
• 🤡 Too Clever — 15 points. The go-to “obscure” pick that is not actually obscure. Everyone reaches for it.
• 🐟 Schooler — 30 points. Solid, but it swims with the school.
• 🦑 Rare — 60 points. Genuinely uncommon.
• 🏮 Deep Cut — 85 points. True obscurity. Few go this deep.
• 🌟 One in a Krillion — 100 points. The designated gem.
• ⬛ Miss — 0 points. No accepted answer before the time ran out.

Every point sinks your dive 10 metres, so seven gems would reach 700 points — the trench floor. Your day is then rated: Plankton up to 150, Schooler 151–250, Rare 251–350, Deep cut 351–449 and One in a krillion from 450.

Not every prompt uses every tier. Some days have no Too Clever answers at all, and prompts with few answers may have only a handful of Deep Cuts.

How is rarity decided?

According to the official Krillion FAQ, it depends on the prompt:

• Some prompts are scored mechanically against a familiarity database — how often a word or name actually appears in what people read and write.
• Prompts that cannot be reduced to a number like that get a mix of LLM assistance and a manual pass.

Tiers reflect how familiar an answer is in general, not how many players chose it that day: an answer picked by thousands of players can still be Rare.

What is the Krillion gem?

Each prompt has a featured answer called the Krillion. It is not chosen on rarity alone: past a certain depth, rarity becomes hard to tell apart, so the gem is also picked for fun — an answer that is satisfying to land on and that at least a few players can actually get.

Why was a fair answer not accepted?

Answer sets are built by aggregating sources such as dictionaries, wiki pages and encyclopedias, then merging and cleaning the result. Occasionally a source is missed, so a fair answer may not be listed.

Why did autocorrect change my answer?

Some prompts have thousands of accepted answers, and many have aliases. Autocorrect checks those aliases too, so being a letter or two off one of them can turn your guess into a different answer than you intended.

Sometimes the game shows the correction first and asks you to submit again, so you can confirm it or change your answer.

What this means for your strategy

• Go one step past your first idea, but stay with answers you are sure are valid.
• Be wary of the answer that feels cleverly obscure: it is often a Too Clever worth only 15 points.
• Type clear, standard names to avoid accidental autocorrect matches.
• Use our daily hints to see which answers are common and which go deeper.