Krillion strategy: how deep divers think

The first answer that arrives is the crowd's answer. It feels fast and obvious because it is — thousands of players produced it before you, which is precisely why it sits in the Plankton tier at 10 points. Train yourself to hear it, nod, and move on. Your real answer is the second or third thing you think of, and it is usually worth three to six times as much.

A useful trick: when a prompt lands, silently name the obvious answer and then ask “what else is true here?” A country with the letter D is not just Canada — it is also Denmark, Chad, Ireland, Finland... and the further down that list your mind walks, the deeper the tier. The walk itself is the skill.

Every experienced player has a tier they hate, and it is Too Clever: 15 points for an answer that felt like a Deep Cut. These are the fashionable obscure picks — the ones internet culture has already agreed are “the clever answer”. If an answer feels like it would get knowing nods at a pub quiz, it is probably Too Clever. Genuinely rare answers feel slightly lonely by comparison: correct, specific, and not famous for being obscure.

Rare answers cluster. For almost any prompt, the deep answers live on a different shelf than the obvious one: a different continent, a different decade, a different use, a wild species instead of a pet, a raw ingredient instead of a finished dish. When you are stuck at Schooler depth, do not push harder on the same shelf — jump shelves. Geography prompts reward Africa and Central Asia; food prompts reward ferments, offal, and regional dishes; animal prompts reward the nocturnal and the deep-sea.

This is trainable, and the training ground is free: the category packs deal prompts from one shelf at a time, and every prompt page shows you the full ranked bank for that prompt after the fact.

Twenty-five seconds is generous for a Schooler and tight for a Deep Cut, so spend it deliberately. A rhythm that works: five seconds to discard the obvious, ten to walk the shelves, five to commit. If the sonar is under five seconds and you are still hunting, type the best answer you have — a banked Rare you are unsure of beats a timeout, and even a Schooler beats the zero that “nothing landed” pays.

Never spend a whole dive's composure on one prompt. A miss costs at most 100 points of ceiling; tilting costs the next three prompts too. Marathon players learn this fastest — 21 prompts punish a spiral and reward a reset.

The single fastest legal improvement in this game is reading yesterday's answers after your dive. Not to memorise them — the prompts will differ — but to calibrate: see how deep the tail went on prompts you played, notice which shelf the rarest answers lived on, and feel how close your own discarded ideas were. A week of post-dive reading moves a typical score by 60–100 points. The daily hints page (pick a date) offers the same calibration mid-dive, gentler.