Krillion strategy: turn category recall into a cleaner run

Two goals that pull in different directions

A dive ends with a score and a count of correct answers, and only the second one unlocks STARLING. Rarer entries score higher, but every accepted answer advances exactly one destination.

• Score run: six answers at 96 points each plus one pass is 960 × 6 = 5,760 points and a zero on the missed prompt.
• Unlock run: seven ordinary 15-point answers total 1,050 points, and the seventh correct answer opens the space theme.

So a personal best and a first unlock are separate achievements. If the unlock matters, the correct move on a prompt you half-know is a safe, accepted answer rather than a rare guess that returns “Not in this list”. Points are multiplied by ten on display, and the result panel repeats the rare flag whenever an entry's preset value is above 75 — a dive computer at 77 shows Rare! · +770.

What each run contains

The catalog holds 102 prompts: 81 general, 11 deep-sea and 10 space. A voyage draws two prompts from the selected world and five general ones, then shuffles the order. The deck system tries to avoid the last seven prompts you saw, allows at most two prompts from one category and avoids a repeated question family where the remaining pool permits it. A category cannot be predicted from the theme, so reading the prompt is the only reliable preparation.

Each prompt runs on its own 25-second clock. An unrecognised answer does not consume the prompt: the input is marked invalid, the message reads “Not in this list. Try another.”, and the timer keeps running. Only an accepted answer, a pass or the timeout moves the round forward.

Case 1: what a diver wears

The ocean prompt “Name something a diver wears” accepts 18 entries. Here is the range of preset values, with aliases that score the same as the main entry:

Three results are worth separating:

• Supported but unusual: “bcd” is the standard abbreviation for buoyancy compensator and an accepted alias that pays 92, while “rebreather” pays 96 with no alias at all. Both are ordinary technical-diving vocabulary, not trick answers.
• A generic alias: typing “watch” is accepted as dive watch for 55. The list treats the everyday word as a route to one specific item, so a vaguer answer can still score if the maintained list says so.
• Reasonable but unsupported: “dive knife”, “torch”, “flashlight”, “camera” and even “knife” are rejected. They are real gear and plausible answers; they simply are not entries in this prompt's list. Under the clock, the useful response is to switch to a listed category of gear, not to keep insisting.

Plurals are not handled by a general rule. “Flippers” is an alias of fins and “air tank” is an alias of tank, yet “masks” and “dive masks” are both rejected while “dive mask” is accepted. The maintained alias list, not English morphology, decides.

Case 2: fruit or vegetable is an authored boundary

The food prompts show why the category wording matters more than botanical truth. “Name an edible fruit” rejects tomato, avocado, cucumber, olive and pumpkin. The vegetable prompt accepts tomato at 19 and cucumber at 25. Aubergine is accepted as an alias of eggplant for 36, and dragonfruit is accepted as an alias of dragon fruit for 55.

The list follows the everyday kitchen split for some entries, not a botanical definition. That is a property of the authored data, not something a player can win by arguing. In a timed round the productive move is to name a listed example close to the prompt's own wording and save the taxonomy debate for outside the game.

Case 3: what normalisation actually forgives

The matcher also folds accents, turns “&” into “and”, ignores apostrophes and removes punctuation before comparing. It does not spell-correct, stem words, or search for partial matches. A rejected answer costs only time, which is why retrying with a listed form is usually better than passing.

A decision order for one prompt

1. Read the category, not just the noun. “Fruit”, “vegetable” and “something a diver wears” are lists with edges.
2. Say the answer you are confident is listed. Correctness comes first if the unlock is the goal; the score is fixed by the first accepted answer.
3. If it is rejected, use the remaining seconds. Try a listed synonym, an abbreviation alias such as bcd (buoyancy compensator), or a narrower term such as dive computer. The clock keeps running, so this is the main recovery tool.
4. Pass only when you have nothing left. Pass and timeout both award zero and neither advances the sub. Passing early does not protect anything; it just ends the prompt sooner.

Reading the result panel

• Dive score is the sum of preset values × 10 for correct answers only.
• Rarest signal is the single highest-scoring correct answer, not an average and not the number of rare answers.
• n of 7 correct and the deepest destination describe progress. Passed and timed-out prompts are marked on the round pips.
• Unlock happens only in Deep Sea and only when all seven are correct in one dive. A five-figure score with one pass does not open STARLING.
• Storage: the unlock, best scores, voyage counts and recent question history stay in this browser and do not sync between devices.

Limits of this guide

Every score quoted here is an authored game-balance value stored with the question. It is not an estimate of how often other players answer that way, and the site has no such statistics. The lists are finite and may reject valid English, as the diver-gear and fruit cases show. Nothing on this page reveals another player's draw, a daily answer, or the original Krillion question service; this is an independent game with its own 102-prompt catalog.

Related games with a different kind of recall

• Minute Cryptic Unlimited — solve one cryptic clue by separating definition, wordplay and indicator. Krillion asks for one word from a category under a 25-second clock; a cryptic clue gives you all the material and asks you to parse it.
• Phoodle — guess a five-letter food word in six tries with per-letter feedback. Krillion scores category recall; Phoodle narrows a single hidden word using letter positions.