Krillion's Six Rarity Tiers, Explained by Someone Who Logs Them Daily
Krillion grades every valid answer into six rarity tiers, and after logging dozens of daily sheets I can tell you the tier names undersell what's really a spectrum of crowd behavior. Here's what each tier actually looks like in the wild — the experiential companion to our reference rarity tiers page, which has the full score table.
Plankton (10 points): the surface layer
Plankton answers are the ones the room shouts in unison. Apple for a red fruit, tennis for a net sport, Titanic for a famous ship. In the sheets I log, Plankton is consistently the most populated tier — often a third or more of a prompt's roster. Landing here means your answer was correct and utterly predictable. The game is gentle about it: 10 points, 100 meters, and a nudge to swim deeper.
Too Clever (15 points): the loophole tier
This is the tier that surprises new players. Too Clever answers are technically valid but bend the prompt — "watermelon (the inside)" for a red fruit, "Earth" for a fictional planet played straight. The game accepts them and charges you a cleverness tax: 15 points. My honest read after watching these daily: Too Clever is not a reliable strategy. Whether a stretch gets accepted at all varies by prompt, and I can't give you a rule for which loopholes pass — the game's own judgment is the only arbiter, and it isn't fully predictable.
Schooler (30 points): textbook correct
Schooler is the tier of solid education — the capital you learned in class, the instrument from music appreciation, the phobia from a trivia calendar. These answers are clearly correct and clearly not obscure. Most engaged players live here, and that's fine: a seven-Schooler dive scores 210, triple the all-Plankton baseline. Schooler is the floor of good play, not the ceiling.
Rare (60 points): the working goal
Rare is where correct meets uncommon — pomegranate instead of apple, sitar instead of guitar. In the archive, Rare answers typically share a fingerprint: they're ordinary knowledge retrieved from an angle the crowd didn't take. Nothing about them requires expertise; they require one extra second of thought. That's why our strategy guide treats Rare as the realistic daily target rather than the flashy tiers above it.
Deep Cut (85 points): earned obscurity
Deep Cuts are obscure-but-legitimate: the nyckelharpa, the Englund Gambit, Ngerulmud. They almost always come from genuine domain interest — the chess player naming openings, the geography nerd naming capitals. You can't fake Deep Cut access, but you can widen your range by studying past sheets; our archive shows exactly which answers reached this tier on every logged dive.
How the tiers distribute on a real sheet
Pull any day from the archive and the shape repeats: Plankton carries the most answers, Schooler and Rare form the fat middle, Too Clever is a thin sprinkle of loopholes, and Deep Cut plus One in a Krillion together rarely account for more than a small handful per prompt. That pyramid is the game's difficulty curve in disguise — the points multiply exactly as the crowd thins. It's also why a single Deep Cut changes your daily total more than upgrading three Schoolers to Rare.
One in a Krillion (100 points): the trench
The top tier is what it says: a valid answer nearly nobody submitted. Worth 100 points — a full 1,000 meters in one word. One honest caveat from the logs: some prompts have no Krillion-tier answer at all on a given day, and chasing the tier blind is how players bust with invalid guesses. Treat it as a happy accident that deep expertise occasionally produces, and celebrate accordingly when today's sheet shows you found one.
To see the tiers in the wild, look up any word in the answer checker — it reports the exact tier and score per prompt — or open today's hints for each tier's answer count on the live dive, spoilers withheld.
Frequently asked questions
How many rarity tiers does Krillion have?
Six. From most common to rarest: Plankton (10 points), Too Clever (15), Schooler (30), Rare (60), Deep Cut (85) and One in a Krillion (100). Every valid answer lands in exactly one tier, and your 7 prompt scores add up to a daily total out of 700.
What is a One in a Krillion answer?
One in a Krillion is the rarest tier — a valid answer almost no other player submitted, worth 100 points or 1,000 meters of dive depth. Across the sheets we log, most prompts have zero to two answers in this tier, so it cannot be farmed deliberately; it happens when real expertise meets the right prompt.
Is Too Clever a bad score in Krillion?
Not exactly. Too Clever answers are technically valid but judged a stretch — loophole answers like 'watermelon' for a red-fruit prompt. At 15 points they beat Plankton's 10, so a Too Clever is a small win, not a failure.