The six tiers
| Tier | Points | Depth per answer | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| One in a Noillirk | 100 | 1000m | 1,000m — the gem |
| Deep Cut | 85 | 850m | 850m — connoisseur country |
| Rare | 60 | 600m | 600m — the turn |
| Schooler | 30 | 300m | 300m — honest water |
| Too Clever | 15 | 150m | 150m — the trap layer |
| Plankton | 10 | 100m | 100m of drift |
| Missed | 0 | 0m | Unbanked, blank, skipped or timed out |
One in a Noillirk — 100 points
One in a Noillirk is the designated rarest answer for the prompt — usually exactly one in the bank. It is not merely obscure; it is the answer the research says a room of a thousand players would produce once. A hundred points, a full kilometre from a single prompt, and the placard glows gold in the trench dark. Seven in one dive is the perfect 700, the whole reason the trench floor exists.
Deep Cut — 85 points
Deep Cut — a term borrowed from music, where it means the album track only real fans know — is true obscurity that is still fair. The bank knows these answers; the crowd just never reaches them: Vaduz, bucatini, Zheng He, the theremin. Eighty-five points, 850 metres, and the light from the surface is a rumour. Few divers bank a Deep Cut every dive; the great ones bank them in bunches.
Rare — 60 points
Rare is where backwards thinking starts paying rent. These answers are genuinely uncommon: the second-page country, the losing Oscar nominee, the fermented food your grandmother makes and the internet doesn't list. Sixty points triples a Schooler, and two Rares in a dive will beat five Plankton without breaking a sweat.
Schooler — 30 points
Schooler answers swim with the school: solid, sensible, correct without being either the first thought or the fake-deep one. Thirty points is the backbone of a good dive — seven Schoolers make 210 and a respectable Glass Reef finish — but no dive was ever legendary on Schoolers alone. This is the tier of the well-prepared generalist.
Too Clever — 15 points
Too Clever is the most instructive tier in the game. It is the answer that feels obscure: the 'underrated' film everyone calls underrated, the 'secret' capital every quiz fan knows. It outscores Plankton by half as much again and seduces new players for weeks. Learn to recognise the Too Clever feeling — smug, quick, comfortable — and you have learned the game's central skill.
Plankton — 10 points
The answer everyone blurts out. Plankton is not a bad answer — it is the correct, obvious, first-thought answer, which is exactly the problem: a thousand strangers typed it in the same second you did. Ten points, a hundred metres, and the surface still in sight. Every prompt has two or three Plankton banked, because the crowd's first instinct is remarkably consistent.
One prompt, every tier: the ladder in real answers
Tiers are abstract until you watch one prompt fill them. This is a real banked prompt — "Name a country with the letter Z in its name" — with its answers shelf by shelf:
| Tier | Points | Banked answers | Why they sit there |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plankton | 10 | Zambia · Zimbabwe · Azerbaijan | The alphabet does the crowd's thinking — Z is in the name everyone rehearses first. |
| Too Clever | 15 | Czechia · Belize | The "discovery" answers — half the room discovers them in the same second. |
| Schooler | 30 | Switzerland · New Zealand | Solid and correct — but both are hiding in plain sight inside everyday phrases. |
| Rare | 60 | Mozambique · Tanzania | Genuinely uncommon: you have to leave the alphabet and picture the map. |
| Deep Cut | 85 | Kazakhstan · Uzbekistan | The -stan shelf most players forget the prompt even allows. |
| One in a Noillirk | 100 | Bosnia and Herzegovina · Kyrgyzstan | The gems: the Z nobody rehearses, in names nobody says first. |
Read the ladder backwards and it becomes a strategy: the winning move was never a word you didn't know — Kyrgyzstan was in your head the whole time, queued behind Zambia. It was a word you knew fourth. Every prompt in the bank hides a ladder shaped like this one; the daily answers pages publish them all, one day at a time.
Depth, zones and the shape of a dive
Points convert to depth at ten metres per point, which maps your dive onto the real ocean's zones: the Sunlight Zone down to 200m, the Twilight Zone to 1,000m, the Midnight Zone to 4,000m, the Abyssal plain beyond that, and the Hadal Zone — named for Hades — below 6,000m. A dive crosses real marks on the way down: the deepest scuba dive ever recorded (332m), the resting place of the Titanic (3,800m), the trench floor at 7,000m where only a perfect 700 can land. The scene marks each crossing as you pass it — depth here is not a metaphor pasted over a score; it is the score, drawn to scale.
The practical consequence: one gem outweighs a school of plankton. A single One in a Noillirk (100) equals ten Plankton answers — more than an entire dive of first instincts. Score-chasing in Noillirk is therefore never about answering more; it is about answering rarer, once, per prompt. Quality is the whole ladder.
So — what is a good Noillirk score?
Anything past 250 is a good score; past 350 is a great one; past 450 is exceptional. The typical player's curve centres near 280, so a Mirror Deep finish (251–350) already puts you around the middle of the serious divers, a Reverse Current finish (351–449) beats roughly four players in five, and True Noillirk territory (450+) means you banked Rares and Deep Cuts all the way down. Below 150 is not a verdict — it's a first week. Scores here measure how far past the crowd you thought, not how much you know, which is why they move so satisfyingly with practice.
Mirror ranks: what your total says about you
| Total score | Rank | Reading |
|---|---|---|
| 0–150 | Surface Reflection | You saw your own first instincts looking back at you. Everyone starts here — the mirror is honest, not cruel. |
| 151–250 | Glass Reef | Below the obvious, into structured water. A Schooler-heavy dive with the occasional Rare glinting in the reef. |
| 251–350 | Mirror Deep | Backwards thinking is working. The crowd is above you now, visible as silhouettes against the light. |
| 351–449 | Reverse Current | You are swimming against the flow on purpose — Rares and Deep Cuts stacked dive after dive. |
| 450–700 | True Noillirk | Trench territory. Sustained, deliberate obscurity across all seven prompts. The mirror salutes you. |
Most first dives land in Surface Reflection or Glass Reef — the game's typical-player curve centres near 280, which means a 351+ Reverse Current finish already beats roughly four divers in five. The strategy guide is essentially a manual for moving one rank band per week: unlearn the first answer, distrust the clever one, and stock your memory with second-page knowledge — Vaduz, natto, siphonophores, losing finalists.
Pick your tier. Dive for it.
One dive per day, seven prompts, 25 seconds each. The rarer your answer, the deeper you sink — 700 points is a perfect dive.