Anomaly Commissions

Anomaly Commissions are the core mission type in Neverness to Everness. These commissions task players with investigating and resolving supernatural anomalies that threaten the city of Hethereau. They form the backbone of the game's PvE content, driving both the main storyline and the endgame loop. Every commission accepted through the Eibon Antique Shop provides a general idea of the location and nature of the anomaly the player will face, though the details often unfold in unexpected ways once the investigation begins.

The Eibon Connection

The Eibon Antique Shop stays afloat financially by taking on Anomaly Commissions from the public. Citizens, businesses, and local organizations post requests whenever supernatural disturbances arise that the Bureau of Anomaly Control cannot prioritize or respond to quickly enough. The player character, Esper Zero, joins Eibon as its first unlicensed Anomaly Hunter, lending their unique abilities to help the shop clear its commission backlog.

This setup provides the narrative frame for the entire mission structure. The player is not a government agent or a guild mercenary; they are an antique shop employee moonlighting as a supernatural problem-solver. The financial pressure on Eibon shapes which jobs the crew accepts and what risks they are willing to take, giving commissions a grounded, underdog quality even when the threats themselves are anything but small.

How Commissions Work

Each Anomaly Commission begins at the commission board inside the Eibon Antique Shop. The briefing provides a rough location, a description of the reported disturbance, and sometimes background on the client who submitted the request. From there, the player travels to the designated area in or around Hethereau to begin the investigation.

The structure of a commission typically follows three phases. First, the player gathers information at the scene, examining clues, speaking to witnesses, or tracking environmental disturbances. Second, the source of the anomaly is identified and the player must confront it directly. Third, the anomaly is resolved, either through combat or through a non-violent solution depending on the commission.

Not every commission plays out the same way. Some investigations focus heavily on tracking clues and following leads before any fighting begins. Others drop the player straight into the action from the moment they arrive. The variety keeps the commission loop from becoming repetitive, as the game treats anomalies less like generic mob encounters and more like self-contained stories. One commission might involve dealing with "Mysties" causing trouble at a local hot pot restaurant, while another might place the player inside a surreal maze that defies normal logic.

Anomaly Commission Bosses

Some Anomaly Commissions culminate in a full boss fight against an Anomaly Boss. These bosses are among the most memorable encounters in the game, each bringing a unique fighting style, distinct mechanics, and a rich backstory that ties into the lore of Hethereau. The stories behind these bosses shed light on the city's complex history and the mysteries surrounding why anomalies manifest in the first place.

Understanding an Anomaly Boss's motivations and origins is part of the commission experience. The narrative details provided during the investigation phase offer context for who or what the boss once was and what drove them to become an anomaly. This design choice turns boss encounters into something more than a gear check; they become a payoff for the detective work that preceded them.

Defeating certain Anomaly Commission Bosses can reward players with unique Arcs (weapons) that cannot be obtained through other means. These boss-exclusive drops make commission bosses a valuable target for players looking to expand their arsenal beyond what the gacha system and standard progression provide.

Commission Types

Anomaly Commissions exist alongside several related commission systems. While they share the same general framework of accepting a job, investigating, and resolving, each type serves a different purpose and targets a different tier of player readiness.

In addition to these commission types, the endgame introduces further challenge modes such as Circle Bounty, Anomaly Dungeons, and the Pink Paws Heist, each offering distinct encounters and reward structures for experienced players.

Rewards and Progression

Completing Anomaly Commissions yields standard rewards including experience points, currency, and materials used for character and equipment upgrades. The rewards scale with commission difficulty, making higher-tier commissions worth the additional effort and preparation they demand.

More importantly, completing commissions contributes directly to City Tycoon progression. City Tycoon is Hethereau's overarching advancement system that unlocks new facilities, businesses, and quality-of-life improvements across the city as the player levels it up. Meeting specific requirements such as finishing a certain number of commissions or acquiring particular resources raises the player's City Tycoon level, which in turn grants access to features like the garage, the ability to own property, and the Hunter Exchange. Some characters are also gated behind City Tycoon milestones.

Combat and Engagement

The combat system's depth ensures that commissions remain engaging even when replayed. Players field a party of up to four characters, each equipped with Arcs and Consoles, and belonging to a specific Esper element. Chaining Esper abilities between characters generates powerful elemental reactions through the Esper Cycle, and learning to exploit these reactions is central to clearing tougher commissions efficiently.

Boss commissions in particular reward players who learn attack patterns and optimize their team rotations. Parrying, stagger management, and well-timed character swaps separate a smooth commission clear from a drawn-out struggle. This mechanical depth gives the commission loop its staying power at endgame, where faster and cleaner clears become a goal in their own right.

Tips for New Hunters

Horror-Focused Commissions

A portion of Anomaly Commissions lean directly into horror rather than combat. These are cases where the threat is atmospheric and psychological rather than a brawl, and they push the player through a dread-heavy investigation instead of a fight loop. The current beta has pushed horror further than the previous test build, with the Nullification process for some cases involving long stretches of tension, environmental puzzles, and stalker-style pursuers rather than traditional Anomaly Bosses.

The The Hospital, sometimes referenced in-lore as the Nameless Hospital, is a flagship example of this style. The setting is a shuttered medical facility whose records describe an outbreak of anomalous infection: patients admitted with unexplained itching and scratch wounds, compulsive bandaging, extreme sensitivity to light and sound, and behavior that staff could not distinguish between psychiatric disorder and anomaly influence. Commission notes trace the outbreak through a patient coded A&05, the transfer of caregivers to observation wards, the isolation of the infected, and a hospital-wide emergency alert. The atmosphere is deliberately oppressive, and horror-focused commissions like this one function more as survival investigations than combat encounters.

When the player enters a designated horror-focused commission area, the game displays a warning popup stating that the content contains mild horror elements. This prompt is the clearest in-game signal that a commission has been flagged as a horror case rather than a standard combat case.

Combat-Focused Commissions and High Risk Anomaly Fights

The other major branch of Anomaly Commissions is combat-focused. These plays run closer to open-world boss duels and culminate in a direct fight, rather than an extended investigation. Within this branch, High Risk Anomaly Fights form a ladder of progressively harder overworld boss encounters. Each rung raises the enemy level and layers extra mechanics on top of the base fight, so clearing the higher tiers requires both better gear and sharper play than the lower ones. Enemies for these fights can be located and tracked directly from the map menu, which makes them easy to queue up once a player has completed the core mission critical path.

The confirmed High Risk Anomaly Fight tiers are listed below.

Because the tiers are progressive, the intended path is to climb them in order. Clearing a lower tier typically signals that the player has the gear and mechanical comfort to take the next one, and each step tends to expose weaknesses in team composition that the previous step did not.

Initiation and Area Warnings

A commission does not always begin at the Eibon Antique Shop commission board. Many are triggered by stumbling into an in-world client, and the initiation cue is often a small, easily missed encounter rather than a formal quest hand-off. For horror cases like the Nameless Hospital, the trigger is finding a man muttering at a wall in an otherwise empty stairwell of the hospital site. Approaching and speaking with a figure like this is what flips the area into an active commission instance for the player.

Once an area is designated as an active commission zone, a static-style warning popup confirms entry. For horror-flagged cases this is the same prompt noting that the content contains mild horror elements. The popup acts as both a content notice and a mechanical cue: from that moment forward, commission-specific rules apply to the zone, anomaly-tied doors and elevators behave as the scenario requires, and the normal overworld fade between rooms is replaced with the case's own logic.

Object Anomalies and Nullification

Not every commission comes from a person. Everyday objects in Hethereau can also become the source of a case. An elevator, for example, can turn into an object anomaly through a malfunction that reroutes the cabin to anomalous realms instead of its intended floors. Cases like this present as ordinary building infrastructure on the surface, but anyone who rides the fixture is pulled somewhere that should not exist, which is why citizens flag them for anomaly hunters.

Object anomalies can self-resolve. If the affected object is simply avoided long enough, its anomalous state nullifies on its own. The elevator example nullifies after roughly a year of residents using the stairs instead of the cabin. In practice, waiting out an object anomaly is rarely the preferred outcome: the object is still unusable throughout that period, and citizens typically ask an anomaly hunter from the Eibon Antique Shop to resolve the issue actively rather than lose the fixture for that long. Resolving an object anomaly manually therefore follows the standard commission flow, with the investigation centered on the anomaly object itself rather than on a person or creature.

Multiplayer Commissions

Some Anomaly Commissions are multiplayer-capable. When a case supports co-op, the commission menu flags it as multiplayer-capable on the entry panel, and the player can either queue it with other hunters or still take it on solo. The The Hospital is an example of a case with the multiplayer flag present in the commission menu, even though it can be cleared alone.

The multiplayer flag does not change what the commission is about. A horror case stays a horror case and a combat case stays a combat case whether the party is one Appraiser or a full group. What it does change is who is available to help carry the investigation phase, who can cover flanks during the final confrontation, and how the atmosphere lands. Horror-focused commissions in particular often feel very different with another player present, though the scripted pressure, stalker entities, and area warnings still trigger the same way.

Houdini's Magic Stage as a Safe Stamina Sink

Among the anomaly-themed farming stages opened by clearing the matching commissions, Houdini's Magic Stage stands out for one reason: the experience materials it drops can be fed to any character. There is no element-specific or role-specific gate on the items it produces, so spending stamina here is never wasted resource investment, even on an account that has not yet decided which limited carry to commit to.

Practical recommendation: when stamina is full and the player has not yet picked a long-term build target, run Houdini's Magic Stage rather than letting stamina cap and overflow. Once the player decides on a main DPS, support, and break specialist, the stage's universal-use materials still feed those characters without requiring re-routing of the farm path.

Other anomaly farms (such as Rabbit Hole for cartridges and modules) remain the right call when the player has a specific gear target. Houdini's Magic Stage is the default fallback when there is no specific target in mind.

Common Commission Star Ratings

Common Anomaly Commissions tracked from the map menu carry a star rating from 1 to 4 that signals expected difficulty. The star rating maps to enemy level, complexity of the investigation phase, and reward tier on first clear. New hunters can run the lower-star commissions to learn the format before pushing into harder ones.

In-Zone Tracking Arrow

Once a hunter accepts and tracks an anomaly commission from the map, the Bureau of Anomaly Control highlights a circular search zone on the world map. Driving or walking into that zone activates an in-world arrow that points toward the active anomaly, replacing the broad search circle with directional guidance. Lower-star commissions tend to draw the search zone tightly so that the arrow appears almost immediately on entry, while four-star commissions intentionally widen the zone and bury the activation cue behind environmental interaction. The general flow is: read the briefing, drive to the search zone, follow the arrow once it appears, and trigger the encounter.

This means tracking is not a spoiler. The arrow only lights up after the player has reached the zone, so the briefing's flavor text is still the primary clue for cases that hide their trigger behind an interactable. Hunters who skip the briefing on harder commissions occasionally end up in the zone with the arrow still inactive, which is the cue to look at the case description for an interaction step they missed.

Pearl Hunt Medals From High-Risk Runs

High-Risk Anomaly Fights pay out a dedicated currency called Pearl Hunt Medals, in addition to the funds and Annulith awarded for clearing the encounter. Pearl Hunt Medals are spent at the Mode Shop in the in-game shop interface, which carries character ascension materials, Arc upgrade materials, and account progression items not available through other shops. Because the medals only drop from high-risk clears, the shop functions as a long-term incentive to climb the high-risk ladder past whatever tier the player needs for their current build.

Each high-risk tier (I through VI, covering levels 43 to 88) drops Pearl Hunt Medals on first clear and on every subsequent clear, scaling with tier. This makes the high-risk tier a steady medal faucet rather than a one-time reward, and a player can re-clear earlier tiers for medals while working through the harder ones for the first time.