How to Play Neverness to Everness: A Beginner's Guide
Neverness to Everness is a fairly, easy to play gacha. Though it follows typical gacha tropes, it has a lot going on outside of combat and quests.
What Is Neverness to Everness?
NTE Neverness to Everness is an open-world action RPG set in Hethereau, a sprawling supernatural city where anomalies are as common as traffic jams. You play as Zero, a new recruit at the Bureau of Anomaly Control, assembling a squad of four Espers to fight, explore, and somehow also manage a cafe and race cars. The game is a lot. But once you understand the basics, you’ll be just fine. The basics include combat, healing, reviving teammates, team building, progression, and the City Tycoon system that most beginners ignore until it's too late.
Understanding Your Progression Tracks
NTE has two separate progression track: Hunter Level and Appraisal Level.
Your Hunter Level goes up as you do activities in the game. Every time it increases, you get free rewards. Appraisal Level unlocks once your Hunter Level hits certain checkpoints: 20, 40, and 50. You will then have to do a quest to complete the Appraisal Level Up. If you ignore this quest, your Hunter Level will be capped until you do the Appraisal Level quest.
Building Your Team
Your squad consists of four Espers, each assigned one of three roles: Damage, Buff, or Survival. A well-balanced team needs at least one of each, with your fourth slot going to a secondary Damage or Buff character depending on your roster.
Damage is a broad category. It covers your main DPS, burst damage dealers, follow-up attackers, and Break specialists. Some Damage characters also double as sub-buffers, so don't assume they only bring raw numbers to the team.
Buff characters are your dedicated support roles. They help allies deal more damage, debuff enemies, and often bring crowd control to keep enemies grouped or locked down.
Survival characters focus entirely on keeping your team alive. One important thing to know going in: there are no dedicated healers in NTE at launch. Survival characters focus on damage boosting, damage mitigation, and durability rather than direct HP restoration.
You can create six different team makeups in Formation on your in-game mobile phone. Deploy different formations depending on the enemy you will be handling. As you play, you will become more familiar with the different anomalies and different powers and resistances of each type.
Combat Basics
Combat in NTE is a pretty simple, rinse and repeat cycle once you understand the different abilities and how and when to use them.
The Esper Cycle: Every character belongs to an element. When you fight, a small bar fills up. When it is full, you can swap to another character to cause a huge reaction. This does a lot more damage than just attacking with one person. If you time your swaps correctly, you can keep the pressure on enemies until they are defeated. A-class characters like Mint, Aurelia, Baicang, or Skia are pretty good for clearing end-game content through system mastery alone.
Perfect Dodge: If you dodge just before an enemy hits you, time slows down and the enemy gets a bit closer to being stunned. Under the enemy health bar, there is a white line called the stun meter. Filling this bar is the goal. Once it is full, the enemy cannot move or fight back for a few seconds; that's when you use your biggest attacks.
Breaking Enemies: Landing attacks on enemies will reduce their Break Meter. When the Break Meter is fully depleted, the enemy becomes Broken and cannot move or attack for some time in battle. Always prioritize breaking tougher enemies before burning your big skills.
Parrying: Learn to parry early. Parrying attacks gives you special advantages over enemies in battle. It's worth practicing in lower-stakes encounters before you're facing harder content.
How to Heal
NTE gives you multiple ways to heal; each suited to different situations.
Wertheimer Towers and ReroRero Phone Booths: One of the simplest ways to heal in NTE is by going to Wertheimer Towers or ReroRero Phone Booths. You will find these naturally while exploring; you can see the undiscovered ones on your map. They also act as fast travel points. You will instantly recover lost health when you travel through one. Once you've visited a tower or phone booth for the first time, activate it, then it's added to your map as a fast travel point.
Food Items: You can buy various food items from the many stores and restaurants across Heathereau. When assigned, holding the designated key opens a quick-use menu; letting you heal instantly without navigating menus. This is extremely useful during intense fights where every second counts. Food-based healing is ideal for topping up health mid-battle or recovering after taking sudden damage. Make sure you use the correct food item for what you want, as there are food items that give different buffs as well as heal.
Healer Characters: Some characters have skills that restore their own or their allies' HP. If you find yourself struggling in combat, it's recommended that you add a character that can heal in your party. Sakiri is your best early-game healer option.
Your Dorm: Dorm resting fully heals your entire party instantly. Return to your dorm after tough encounters to fully reset your team before heading back out. The apartment does not yet have the heal capacity. Unless there is an anomaly furniture that I have yet to collect. Otherwise, fast travel to your property does not heal you or your team.
Healing Arc Passives: Some Arcs have effects that restore a character's HP. This will only take effect once conditions are met. Read the conditions in advance to activate the healing effect at the right time.
How to Resurrect Fallen Teammates
When a teammate goes down mid-battle you have a few options:
Fast Travel to a Tower: One of the quickest emergency recovery tools in the game is fast traveling to a tower. If one or more of your characters are knocked out, using fast travel will automatically revive them.
Return to Your Dorm: If your team is wiped return to your dorm to revive and reset. Also, after completing tough encounters it’s good practice to fast travel to your dorm to fully reset your team.
Resurrect Food: You can resurrect a downed teammate by eating a meal that has the resurrect ability. The first downed teammate will automatically trigger the “Revive Teammate” prompt. After that, there is a 5-minute cooldown.
Stamina and Progression
NTE has two separate stamina systems: Character Pixels and City Stamina.
Character Pixels (Combat Stamina): Stamina refills at one point every 6 minutes; the cap sits at 240 points, so that's a full 24 hours to fill completely. Spend Character Pixels on Anomaly Zones for the fastest experience gains. Not sure which zone to pick? Start with Houdini's Magic Stage. It drops experience materials that work for any character; so, you're not locked into a choice you might regret later.
City Stamina (Tycoon): The Tycoon system runs on its own City Stamina pool; separate from your combat stamina. It resets weekly and the cap grows as your Tycoon Level increases. Every City Stamina point spent equals 1,000 Fons regardless of which activity you choose. Since the payout is the same across all activities, just do whichever one you enjoy.
While it's tempting to use premium currency (Analith) to refresh stamina, this is usually a poor decision for free-to-play players. Analith is far more valuable when saved for character pulls; especially limited banners.
City Tycoon Mode
Don't sleep on City Tycoon. NTE is not just a combat gacha game; it's also a city life simulator. And it’s probably more interesting than the rest of the game. Do odd jobs for the city's residents, buy vehicles, go racing, play mahjong, buy your own property, and even run your own business.
The passive income from a well-run cafe adds up faster than most new players expect. Reinvest in your cafe first; then spend at the Hunter Exchange shop for pool currency and character upgrade materials.
Unlock the cafe early. At City Tycoon Level 4, you can unlock "The Cafe by Origen." This provides a shop that generates Fons over time; upgrading it further increases its earning efficiency.
You will also unlock your first apartment at City Tycoon Level 4. Your apartment will give you certain buffs from the anomalies you have contained. For example, Mechanic repairs your vehicle, Unknown Caller turns your house into a teleport, and Coocoo Alert anomaly clears your wanted level. You can also invite someone to be your roommate. Unfortunately, we have to pick one of the girls who will remain scantily clad while in your apartment. I really wanted to room with Baicang, but we know who this was geared toward…
My second cafe
Gear and Equipment
Artifacts are a grid-based equipment system. You place pieces inside the console, strategically, to form sets which grant bonus stats like critical rate, defense, or damage boosts.
One important rule: Follow a strict ban on farming consoles until Orange (Legendary) rarity becomes available. Farming Purple or Epic gear is a net loss in account velocity because that investment is temporary. Instead, allocate Character Pixels toward Character EXP and Ability materials; which represent permanent improvements to your account's power floor.
In short, don't waste stamina on gear you'll replace. Wait for Legendary rarity before farming consoles seriously.
Gacha and Pulls
Combining pre-registration rewards and in-game event distribution gives you over 120 free gacha pulls at NTE's launch. Use them wisely.
Rerolling is generally not recommended. Even if there is a specific character you want, you can select and obtain one character from the gacha through the Strange Encounters banner. Don't waste time rerolling when you could be playing.
Banner guarantee: The banner character is guaranteed at 75-85 pulls; 90 at worst luck.
Beginner Priority List
Push the main story as far as possible -- it unlocks every key system
Unlock Character Pixels by completing Chapter 1 of the Episode Quest
Unlock City Stamina through the tutorial quest
Get the cafe running at City Tycoon Level 4
Unlock Wertheimer Towers and ReroRero Phone Booths as fast travel/heal points
Don't farm gear until Orange/Legendary rarity is available
Save Analith for banner pulls; never use it on stamina refreshes
Build a team with at least one healer from the start
This is what I have from playing and I will update as I continue to play more. Need help or have questions about something specific like the how to do Inspiration Terminator? Ask in the comments.
