Krillion Glossary: Every Term, Tier & Mechanic Defined

Last updated: 2026-10-14

New to Krillion and lost in the jargon? This glossary defines every term that matters: the six rarity tiers, the core game mechanics, and the practice modes on this site. Each definition is short enough to quote and precise enough to play by.

Terms are the foundation of rarity thinking. You cannot aim for a Deep Cut if you do not know what separates it from Rare, and you cannot dodge Plankton if you cannot recognize a first-thought answer. Learn the vocabulary first — the strategy comes easier after.

One in a Krillion: The rarest rarity tier in Krillion, worth 100 points per answer. It contains the valid answers that almost nobody submitted — typically given by a tiny fraction of players. Landing one is worth 1,000 meters of depth, and two or three in a single dive usually decide the day's leaderboard.
Deep Cut: The second-rarest tier, worth 85 points per answer. Deep Cuts are enthusiast-level answers: real, verifiable, and correct, but known only to people with genuine depth in the category. They are the most trainable tier — studying a category's answer bank converts directly into Deep Cuts.
Rare: The middle-high tier, worth 60 points per answer. Rare answers are genuinely uncommon without being obscure — the kind of answer a knowledgeable player reaches on their second or third thought. Consistent Rare-or-better picks are what separate 4,000-meter divers from 2,500-meter divers.
Schooler: A 30-point tier for answers that are known but not top-of-mind. The name suggests the dynamic: it is what a good student would answer after a moment's thought. Schooler answers are respectable — they keep you off the ocean floor — but they will not win a competitive day.
Too Clever: A 15-point tier and Krillion's great irony: the answer that feels clever but that thousands of other players also thought was clever. It punishes the obvious 'smart' pick — the second-most-famous movie, the capital everyone learns second. If your answer feels smugly clever, check whether it is actually Too Clever.
Plankton: The most common tier, worth 10 points per answer. Plankton answers are everyone's first thought — the most famous movie, the biggest country, the obvious pick. They are correct but worthless for depth. The entire skill of Krillion is learning to recognize your own Plankton instincts and override them.
Dive: One complete game session: seven prompts, one answer each, 25 seconds per prompt. The official game offers exactly one dive per day; Krillion Daily adds unlimited practice dives, marathon runs, and replayable past dives that never affect your official daily score.
Depth: Your score expressed in meters: total points multiplied by 10. A 700-point perfect dive reaches 7,000 meters — the trench floor. Depth is the number players compare, because 'I hit 5,200 meters' tells the story of a dive more vividly than a raw point total.
Prompt: A single naming question in a dive, such as 'name a red fruit' or 'name a chess piece.' Each dive contains exactly seven prompts drawn from eight categories: geography, food, movies, sports, music, science, animals, and history. You get one answer per prompt.
Tier: One of the six rarity bands every answer is sorted into after a dive, based on how many players submitted it. Tiers run from Plankton (most common, 10 points) through Too Clever, Schooler, Rare, and Deep Cut, up to One in a Krillion (rarest, 100 points).
Accepted-answer bank: The hidden list of valid answers for each prompt. Only answers in the bank score — a brilliant answer that is not banked, or a banked answer with a typo, earns zero. This is why spelling discipline matters as much as knowledge in Krillion.
Streak: Consecutive days played. Playing today's dive extends your streak by one; missing a day resets it. Streaks are the game's retention mechanic — they reward showing up daily more than any single deep dive does.
First-thought answer: The answer that surfaces immediately when you read a prompt — and, critically, the answer surfacing for most other players at the same moment. First-thought answers are Plankton by definition. Recognizing yours in real time is the foundational Krillion skill.
Second-thought rule: The core Krillion heuristic: discard your first answer and play your second or third idea instead. Your first thought is the crowd's first thought; your third thought is where the crowd thins out. The rule fails only when your second thought is still famous — calibration comes with practice.
Daily reset: The moment a new dive becomes available: 12:00 AM Eastern Time, every day. The previous dive locks permanently at reset. All streaks, leaderboards, and 'today's answers' pages on this site follow the same midnight-ET boundary.
Unlimited mode: Krillion Daily's free-practice mode: endless fresh prompts with no daily limit and no effect on your official score or streak. The standard training ground for building rarity reflexes — most improving players run ten minutes of unlimited daily.
Marathon mode: Krillion Daily's endurance format: 50 prompts, 3 lives. Any zero-point answer costs a life; lose all three and the run ends. Maximum 5,000 points. The best test of whether your rarity thinking holds up under fatigue.
Category pack: A focused practice set of seven prompts from a single category — geography, food, movies, sports, music, science, animals, or history. Packs are how you drill weak topics without the randomness of a full mixed dive.
Rarity trainer: A Krillion Daily drill that shows you an answer and asks which tier it would land in. It trains the specific judgment the game rewards: not recalling facts, but predicting what other players will say.
Region ladder: A geography technique from our strategy guides: solve place prompts by descending continent to subregion to specific place, deliberately starting from the least-famous corner of the map. It converts 'I know one country there' into 'I know the rare one.'

Got the vocabulary down? Put it to work in the rarity trainer or read the full strategy guide.