How to Win at Krillocity: Tips for Naming More Answers, Faster

Krillocity gives you 30 seconds to name as many answers to a prompt as you can. Each one swims your krill forward: 100 m for the answer everybody gives, up to 1,000 m for one almost nobody does. So every prompt asks two questions at once: how many answers can you get down, and how rare can you make them?

Psychologists have timed people naming things in a category for more than 80 years, and what they found reads like a race plan. This guide starts with the arithmetic of the scoring, then the research, then a plan for each 30 seconds, how to race the room as well as the clock, and the mistakes that cost the most metres.

Each tier takes you further. Plankton 100 m, Too Clever 150 m, Schooler 300 m, Rare 600 m and Deep Cut 850 m, with the top tier at 1,000 m. Three sums follow from that.

• One Rare answer is worth six Plankton answers. Six common answers swim 600 m, and so does a single Rare.
• A Deep Cut takes you 850 m. Two Rare answers together cover 1,200 m.
• But a common answer beats a blank. A racer who spends 30 seconds hunting for one perfect answer and never finds it swims nothing at all.

Five Plankton, two Too Clever, a Schooler, a Rare and a Deep Cut add up to 2,550 m. The Deep Cut contributes 850 m of that distance, and the quicker answers make up the rest.

A race adds one more sum: it pays places, not metres. Depth tokens go by how many racers you finish ahead of, 2,350 for each in a public race, so a lead of one metre is worth exactly as much as a lead of one kilometre, and a tie beats nobody.

The easy answers come first, for everyone

In 1944 W. A. Bousfield and C. H. W. Sedgewick timed people naming members of categories and plotted how many names had come out at each moment. The curve was the same every time: steep at the start, then flattening as the easy answers ran out. Most of what a person will name in a minute arrives in its first part, and the rest comes slowly.

That is why the first answers you think of score least. Everyone in the race is on the same curve, and the start of everyone's curve is the same handful of answers. On Name a living novelist, Stephen King comes to so many people first that he swims 100 m. Salman Rushdie, a few names further down most people's lists, swims 300 m.

People name in clusters, and switch when a cluster runs dry

In 1997 Angela Troyer, Morris Moscovitch and Gordon Winocur split category naming into two skills. Clustering is producing a run of answers from one corner of a category: farm animals, then pets, then birds. Switching is jumping to a new corner when the current one stops giving. Both add to how many answers a person names, and switching is what gets someone going again once the obvious answers are spent.

For a race, this is the most useful finding there is. When the answers stop coming you have not run out of answers. You have run out of the corner you were in.

About twenty a minute is normal

Norms published in 1999 by Tom Tombaugh, Jean Kozak and Laura Rees put a typical adult at roughly twenty animals in a minute, with the count falling with age and rising with years of schooling. A Krillocity prompt is half that time, and every answer has to be typed as well as thought of, so reaching double figures on a prompt is good going. There is more on where that number comes from in how many animals can you name in a minute.

A little pressure helps, and too much hurts

In 1908 Robert Yerkes and John Dodson described how performance rises with arousal up to a point and then falls, the inverted U that now carries their names. A race clock is pressure by design. A racer who freezes when a rival passes, or rushes and starts repeating answers, is on the far side of that curve. The Yerkes-Dodson curve and timed puzzles looks at how to stay near the top of it.

1. Read it in the count-in. Every prompt shows for 2 seconds before its clock starts, with its category over it: Movies, Literature, Lateral and so on. Use them to pick the corner you will start in, so your first answer goes in the moment the clock runs.
2. Empty the obvious answers in a burst. They are only 100 m each, but they are the fastest metres on the clock, and every rival is collecting them too. Keep them short, press Enter after each one, and never wait for a verdict: up to three answers are with the judge at once, and the rest queue behind them in order.
3. Switch the moment you stall. When the answers stop coming, change corners instead of waiting: tropical fruit to berries, capitals to islands, pets to farm animals. A fresh corner gives a fresh run.
4. Hunt rare answers late. When the dial turns pink, 10 seconds from the end, the easy answers are gone for everybody, and the answer only you would think of is the one worth looking for.
5. Send before the buzzer. An answer counts only once it is sent. One already with the judge when the clock hits zero still counts if its verdict comes back within two and a half seconds, but a half-typed word swims nowhere, and an answer still queued behind others comes back late.

Races draw on a pool of 2,723 prompts across 54 categories, from film, television and music to sport, science, words and lateral thinking, and most have a bank of over a hundred known answers, so there is always further to go. A public race deals its seven prompts in rising difficulty: the first are the more open prompts and the last the hardest to fill, so save your best switching for the end. Most prompts are one of four kinds, and each kind has its own corners.

• People (Name a living novelist, Name a rugby player): split them by country, by decade, by genre or by team. The famous names are Plankton; the ones you know from a single book or a single season are where the metres are.
• Titles (Name a book made into a film, Name a fantasy book series): split them by decade, by genre and by who made them. Children's books, foreign films and whatever you loved at school are corners most racers forget.
• Words (Name a word ending in -tion): these have hundreds of answers, so go for volume. Run through the alphabet, or change the word's length: short words, then long ones, then words from a subject you know well.
• Lateral (Name something that spins, Name a thing found in the ocean): split them by place. The kitchen, the playground, the garage, the sky and the sea each give a fresh run, and the odd place you think of last is often where the rarest answer is.

• Read the board between prompts. After each clock a board ranks the racers by what that prompt swam them, with every answer each one gave. It shows what the room reached for, and which kind of answer the prompt rewarded.
• Turn the gaps into answers. The standings give the gap to every racer, and a rival off the screen shows the gap on their ring at its edge. 600 m behind is one Rare, or six Plankton.
• Lead safely. Places pay, so a leader going into the last prompt does best with a steady run of answers the bank is sure to know. Chasing one obscure answer is the trailing racer's play.
• Keep typing to the end. Leads change hands late. In the race we followed answer by answer, the winner was behind with 20 seconds left and still won.

• Waiting for the perfect answer. Thirty seconds is short. A racer who names only rare answers names too few of them.
• Typing the same answer twice. Plurals and other spellings count once, and the second one comes back said: time thrown away.
• Guessing wildly. An answer the bank does not know goes to an AI judge, which looks at up to 12 of them from each racer on each prompt. Once 5 are refused, it stops looking at new ones for the rest of that prompt. Answers you are unsure of spend that allowance, while answers the bank knows still count either way.
• Arguing with a refusal. A refused answer shows no and costs only the seconds it took to type. Move on to the next one.
• Tapping away from the box. On a phone, keep sending with Enter. A tap anywhere else puts the keyboard away, and getting it back costs a second you do not have.

• Race the daily. Seven prompts, the same for everyone, once a day, and the report tells you how far you swam against the whole day's field. The daily race, explained.
• Make a long-clock private race. One prompt of 60 seconds against a friend shows you what comes after the easy answers run out, which is where races are won. Setting one up takes under a minute.
• Do the one-minute test. Name as many animals as you can in a minute with a timer, writing them down, then look at the list and count how many times you switched corners. Do it again with a different category and switch on purpose whenever you slow down.
• Read the boards. Every board between prompts shows the answers each racer gave. The rare ones sit deep in the bank, and the next time a prompt like it comes up you will know where to look.

The race itself is the best practice, though. Find a public race and try the plan on a real clock.