Krillion Scoring Explained: The Math Behind Points, Tiers and Depth

Written by Marina Voss, Founder & Editor · Published August 23, 2026 · Last verified: August 31, 2026

Krillion's scoring is simpler than it looks: six fixed tier values, seven prompts, and one conversion rate. Your daily score is the sum of your tier scores, and your depth is that number times ten. Everything below is arithmetic you can verify against any sheet in our answer archive.

The six fixed values

Every valid answer earns exactly one of these scores — there is no partial credit and no in-between:

One point, ten meters

The depth conversion is a flat 1:10 ratio. A perfect 700-point dive is 7,000 meters — deliberately calibrated to the ocean's hadal zone, the trenches below 6,000 meters. That's the entire theme: Plankton float in sunlit surface water (100 m per answer), while a One in a Krillion answer drops you a full kilometer in one word. The conversion also gives you an instant intuition for scores: multiply by ten and ask "which ocean zone is that?" Sunlight zone ends at 200 m, twilight at 1,000 m, midnight at 4,000 m, abyss at 6,000 m.

The floor, the middle, and the ceiling

The bounds are exact. All Plankton: 7 × 10 = 70 points (700 m). All Schooler: 7 × 30 = 210 (2,100 m). All Rare: 7 × 60 = 420 (4,200 m). Perfect: 700 (7,000 m). These landmarks make the tier gaps visible: moving one answer from Plankton to Rare is worth +50 points — five full all-Plankton prompts' worth of progress in a single swap. Moving one from Rare to Deep Cut is +25. The math explains why the strategy in our strategy guide is "eliminate Plankton first": the bottom of the ladder is where the points leak.

A worked example

Take a realistic mid-strength dive: two Rare answers, three Schooler, one Plankton, one Too Clever. The arithmetic is 60 + 60 + 30 + 30 + 30 + 10 + 15 = 235 points, a 2,350-meter dive — solidly into the midnight zone. Now upgrade just the Plankton answer to Rare: 285 points, and you've added 500 meters by fixing your worst prompt rather than your best. That's the spreadsheet version of every strategy article on this site: the meters are hiding at the bottom of your tier list.

Expected value thinking, honestly

Players often ask what an "average" dive scores. Honest limitation: there is no published distribution of player scores, so nobody outside krillion.io can give a verified average — and I won't invent one. What you can compute is your own expected value under a strategy. Example: suppose reaching for a Deep Cut-tier answer succeeds half the time and busts to zero the rest, versus a safe Schooler at 30. The risky play's expectation is 0.5 × 85 = 42.5 points — better than 30, but only if your true hit rate is at least 30/85 ≈ 35%. Below that, safety wins. Your personal hit rate is a number only your own history can answer, which is exactly what reviewing past sheets on the daily answers page is for.

What the math changes about how you play

Two practical consequences. First, consistency compounds: a player who scores Rare on four prompts and Schooler on three (330) beats a player who hits one Deep Cut and six Plankton (145) every single day. Second, zeros are devastating — one busted prompt costs more than two tier upgrades can repay. The arithmetic rewards a high floor far more than a high ceiling, which is why our first-answer playbook and tier reference both push the same boring advice: stop losing points before chasing them.

To put the arithmetic to use: check where your actual words landed with the answer checker, and if a prompt's pool size surprises you, the hints page shows every day's tier distribution without revealing a single answer.