The rule: the pool is the only law
When a dive resets, each of the seven prompts arrives with an official answer pool — the complete set of answers the game will accept. Some pools run five figures wide; the narrowest we've recorded held just 18 answers (see prompt statistics). Your answer either lives in that set or it doesn't. There is no partial credit for being close, sensible, or defensible.
Why “reasonable” doesn't mean “valid”
The pools are curated, not generated from common sense. Ask for a country whose name ends in an “ee” sound and only a handful of countries qualify — your favorite country simply may not be among them, however reasonable it is. The narrower the pool, the more this bites: with 18 valid answers in the world, an off-the-cuff guess misses more often than it hits.
The counterintuitive part: the crowd's most obvious pick is almost always in the pool. Pools are built to include the famous answers. What gets rejected is usually the middle ground — answers that feel clever but were never on the curator's list.
Rejected vs Too Clever — know your enemy
| Verdict | In the pool? | Points | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rejected | No | 0 | Not an accepted answer — the prompt is lost |
| Too Clever | Yes | 15 | Accepted, but the crowd got there too |
| Plankton | Yes | 10 | The most common answers of all |
| Rare and above | Yes | 60–100 | Genuinely unusual — the paydirt |
Players feel rejections most, but the quieter tax is Too Clever: an answer that counted, just barely. The Too Clever guide dissects that tier — including why its star example (Pluto on a dwarf-planets-allowed prompt) was a fully valid pick that simply everyone made.
The five faces of rejection
Most rejections come from the same five mistakes. Learning to name them mid-clock is most of the cure:
- The near-miss form. Right idea, wrong shape — a descriptor instead of a named thing, the plural of a singular entry, a brand when the pool lists products.
- The off-constraint answer. The prompt added a rule — starts with P, ends in a sound, larger than a country — and the answer ignores it. Reread the prompt before typing, not after scoring.
- The invention. A joke or mashup that feels clever in the moment. Pools list real things; inventions never make the list.
- The outdated or misspelled fact. A city renamed decades ago, a title with the wrong article. The pool forgives famous, not sloppy.
- The too-generic guess. “A website” for a prompt asking for the website's name. Specificity is the entry fee, not the bonus.
Notice that four of the five are fixable by rereading the prompt with two seconds left. The cheapest points in the game are hiding between the question mark and the keyboard.
The border cases are the game
The most-discussed rejections are the near-misses: a Thai dish the pool spelled differently, a dwarf planet a prompt technically allowed, an answer that was famous in one country and absent from a global list. These cases aren't bugs — they're where the game teaches you its catalogs have edges. The players who climb fastest treat every rejection as free information: the pool just showed you one more shape it doesn't contain.
A real dive, walked through
From a dive we played and screenshotted (the verdict screen appears at the top of this guide): on the prompt “Name something you can do with a keyboard shortcut (like copy with Ctrl+C),” typing piano came back rejected — 0 points. Piano is a real word, a famous instrument, and a perfectly reasonable thing to name. It is not, however, something you do with a keyboard shortcut, so it was never in that prompt's pool. Textbook off-constraint rejection.
Same dive, different lesson: on “Name a fruit or vegetable that starts with P,” the answer peach was accepted — Too Clever, plus 15. In the pool, correct, and worth almost nothing, because a few hundred thousand people type peach before their coffee. Two answers, thirty seconds apart: one lost the prompt, one barely paid for it. That's the whole game in one screenshot.
What the autocomplete is quietly telling you
The answer box suggests completions as you type, and those suggestions come from the official pool. Type two or three letters and the menu that drops down is a live probe of what counts: if your candidate appears, it's in the pool; if a near-identical official phrasing appears instead, you've just found the entry your answer needs to match. It's the closest thing the game has to Wordle's tile feedback — use it before burning your one answer.
Habits that stop the bleeding
- Read the pool size first — it's published in the daily reveal. Narrow pool: answer like a textbook. Wide pool: answer like a hipster.
- Prefer famous-but-second-tier over clever-but-marginal. A real, mid-famous answer is almost always in the pool; a cute one almost never is.
- Trust the category's core. The 100-point picks on record are obscure real things — defunct brands, specific cultivars — never inventions.
Our daily hints page puts the pool size and its historical percentile next to every prompt — three seconds of reading that saves whole prompts.
What a rejection actually costs
Arithmetic, not feelings: seven prompts pay a theoretical 700 points, and one rejection deletes a seventh of the ceiling. A safe Schooler answer (30) beats a rejected flash of genius (0) every single day — the full math is in the scoring guide, and the score calculator lets you feel the difference instantly.
Questions people ask
Why did my Krillion answer get rejected?
Because it wasn't inside the prompt's official answer pool. Every prompt has a fixed set of accepted answers published in the daily reveal; only members of that set score anything. An answer can be perfectly reasonable and still not be on the list.
Is a rejection the same as Too Clever?
No. Too Clever means your answer was accepted — it's in the pool — but so many people thought of it that it pays just 15 points. A rejection means the answer wasn't in the pool at all and pays zero. One is a small win; the other is a lost prompt.
How can I tell if an answer will count?
You can't see the pool in advance, but you can read its size. Each prompt's official pool size and how narrow it is historically appear on our hints page right after the 04:00 UTC reset — narrow pools demand precise, textbook answers; wide pools accept almost anything sensible.
Do typos get rejected in Krillion?
Effectively, yes — the pool contains specific spellings and phrasings, and an answer has to match one of them. The autocomplete menu is the practical defence: it shows the official spellings as you type, so a half-typed word plus a glance beats a fast, wrong guess.
Part of the Hints4Today logbook — every guide in one place.
Hints4Today is an independent fan site and is not affiliated with the creators of Krillion. Screenshots of the official game are copyright krillion.io and appear here solely for identification and commentary (fair use). Play the official game at krillion.io.
🐋 Done diving? Whallion — our bonus game where the rarer answer feeds the whale. Hand still warm? Put it to work.