City Tycoon

Overview

City Tycoon is a progression system in Neverness to Everness that tracks the player's progress in owning and developing properties across the city of Hethereau. It consolidates all economic, property, and lifestyle activities into a single progression track. As players invest in businesses, complete odd jobs, purchase properties, and participate in city activities, their City Tycoon level increases, unlocking new features and rewards.

The system is designed as a long-term lifestyle loop that runs parallel to the game's combat-focused progression. It starts small, with players renovating a coffee shop near their home base, and scales up to owning luxury mansions and running profitable businesses across the city. The tagline captures the arc well: from running a hole-in-the-wall cafe to owning a penthouse overlooking the skyline.

City Tycoon Level

The City Tycoon system has a level-based progression that gates access to new features and activities. Leveling requires meeting specific requirements such as completing commissions, acquiring certain resources, earning income, and engaging with business activities. Each level milestone unlocks new capabilities.

Tycoon levels gate progress, and progress is gated by missions, not by Fons. A common mistake is to assume that piling up Fons through cafe income, taxi runs, or part-time jobs will tick the tycoon level over once a wallet threshold is hit. The tycoon track does not work that way: each level requires the relevant City Tycoon mission steps to be completed in order, and a player who hoards Fons without completing the on-the-board task list will not advance even with millions in the bank. Plan each session around completing the next pinned tycoon mission first, then return to passive income or hobby grinding once the rank is unlocked.

Confirmed Unlocks

Activities unlock progressively as the City Tycoon level increases. Beta testers reported only being able to unlock the first few tiers during limited test periods, confirming that the system is designed for sustained long-term engagement rather than rapid completion.

Chiz: Free S-Rank Character

The most notable City Tycoon reward is Chiz, an S-Rank Cosmos character who is unlocked at City Tycoon Level 18. Chiz is a shy banker affiliated with the Pink Paws Bank who doubles as an urban guide. She is one of the few S-Rank characters in NTE that can be obtained entirely for free, without any gacha pulls.

Chiz's Awakening effects can also be fully progressed through in-game activities rather than requiring duplicate gacha pulls. The official NTE Global announcement confirmed: "All her Awakening Effects can be progressed in-game." This makes Chiz the most accessible S-Rank character in the roster.

Properties

Players can purchase multiple property types across Hethereau using Fon (the in-game currency). Properties serve as personal spaces for decoration, character interaction, and passive gameplay bonuses.

Property Types

Properties are purchased through in-game housing centers. Each property comes with bare necessities and can be furnished with items found while exploring the city or purchased from stores. All owned properties have a quick-teleport function, allowing players to fast travel to any home they own.

Decoration and Furniture

Properties start empty and can be customized with furniture, collectibles, and decorative items. Furniture is acquired through exploration, shop purchases, and special activities. The decoration system allows free placement of items to create personalized living spaces.

The developers confirmed in their launch roadmap that the housing system will be expanded with better furniture placement controls, improved interaction, and additional decoration options for the April 29, 2026 launch.

Property Bonuses

Owned homes provide gameplay bonuses beyond aesthetics. Properties unlock anomaly trinkets that grant passive buffs, and they generate modules for use in character building through certain anomaly creatures. These bonuses incentivize property investment even for players primarily focused on combat progression.

Shop Management

Players can run their own store in Hethereau with full business management capabilities. Shop management involves three core activities:

Shops generate passive income over time. The revenue starts small but grows as the player's business empire expands and they invest in upgrades. Character Life Skills can also influence shop performance. For example, Hathor has a Life Skill called "Practice Makes Perfect" that influences customer purchasing preferences and increases base dish prices.

Beta feedback noted that the business simulation section needed revenue tracking graphs to help players understand whether they were running a profitable operation. This UI improvement is expected for the launch version.

Income Sources

The City Tycoon system provides multiple avenues for earning Fon:

Income from shops starts at a low rate but scales as the player invests in upgrades and expands their portfolio. Players who do not want to manage their own business can still earn Fon by working as part-timers at other shops around town.

Character Placement

Characters with a bond level of 4 or higher can be placed in owned properties. Placing a character in an apartment, mansion, or business unlocks unique interactions that deepen the bond further. The higher a character's bond level, the more responsive they become to player requests.

Confirmed Interactions

• Rock-Paper-Scissors challenges with placed characters

• Physical interactions (for example, petting characters when they are seated)

• Hand-holding while walking through the apartment and nearby city areas

• Phone calls and text messaging with companion characters

• Inviting characters as city companions for exploration

The launch roadmap promises additional companion interactions, including the ability to invite Chiz to activities and a new first-person perspective for hand-holding sequences.

Vehicles

The garage is unlocked through City Tycoon progression. Once available, players can purchase vehicles from dealerships using Fon. Vehicle types include regular cars, muscle cars, supercars, sport bikes, motorcycles, and scooters. Vehicles can be customized at garages with visual mods (bumpers, spoilers, tires, body color, decals) and performance tuning (handling, top speed, acceleration).

Connection to Other Systems

City Tycoon does not exist in isolation. It connects to several other NTE systems:

Tips

• Invest in your first shop early. Even small passive income adds up over days and weeks of play.

• Prioritize reaching City Tycoon Level 18 to unlock Chiz. She is a free S-Rank Cosmos character with fully progressible Awakening effects.

• Furnish your properties for more than just aesthetics. Anomaly trinkets from homes provide real combat bonuses.

• Place high-bond characters in your properties to deepen relationships and unlock unique interactions.

• Use part-time jobs as a supplementary income source while your shop revenue grows.

Hethereau Hobbies Roster

The Hethereau Hobbies section of the city map consolidates every City Tycoon activity into a single browsable list. At launch the roster contains nine distinct activities, each with its own unlock requirement, reward track, and stamina cost. Every activity contributes to the shared tycoon experience bar and to the daily and weekly milestone trackers, so players can rotate between them based on mood rather than being forced into a single preferred loop.

City Stamina

All nine hobby activities draw from a dedicated resource called City Stamina. This is a completely separate pool from the stamina that feeds combat dungeons and anomaly hunts, so investing heavily in taxi runs, coffee shop shifts, or racing does not reduce how much anomaly or story content a player can clear on the same day. At Co-Ex Test scale the cap starts at 500 per week, and the cap grows as the player's tycoon level rises. The pool refreshes on a weekly cycle rather than a daily one, which encourages batching hobby play into longer sessions on chosen days rather than trickling in small amounts every day.

Dual stamina system. Because city activities use City Stamina while Anomaly Commissions, Circle Bounty, and other combat content draw from the separate dungeon stamina pool, the two progression tracks do not compete with each other for daily play time. This is deliberate: the system is meant to let the combat min-maxer and the urban-life player both complete a full rotation on the same account without either track starving the other of resources.

Maximum City Tycoon Level

The Co-Ex Test build exposed a maximum City Tycoon rank of 45. Each level past the early unlocks gates additional features, premium currency payouts, and account-wide rewards, with milestone tiers distributing extra Solid Dice, Fabricated Dice, Annulith, and Arc material bundles. Reaching the upper levels is a long-term goal rather than a launch-week sprint; the City Stamina weekly cap ensures that even fully optimized play only pushes tycoon progress a fixed distance per week.

Portable Music Player

A later City Tycoon milestone unlocks a portable music player that lets the player character stream the in-game music catalogue while walking around the city, not just while driving. With the launch music collaborations bringing Persona 5 Royal, Persona 5: The Phantom X, and Tower of Fantasy tracks into the playlist pool, the portable player effectively functions as a traversal soundtrack for the full open world rather than being tied to vehicle or venue audio. The exact tycoon level at which the player unlocks is gated behind mid-to-late progression and has not been published as an exact number.

Menu Hubs

Opening the City Tycoon menu presents five top-level hubs that group every non-combat city activity into a single browsable interface. The layout is consistent across progression: new unlocks slot into the existing hub they belong to, so players do not need to relearn the menu after each tycoon level.

Hobbies List

The Hobbies hub exposes every activity that feeds City Tycoon experience. Each entry is flagged for whether it runs solo or requires multiplayer, alongside the headline gameplay loop. Single-player hobbies run on demand; multiplayer ones depend on matchmaking, though most fill AI opponents into empty seats so they remain playable during off-peak hours.

Activity Stamina Costs

Each hobby deducts a fixed amount of City Stamina per attempt. Driving-heavy activities that tie up the player for several minutes charge more than shorter mini-games. Refreshes come from consumables looted, purchased, or awarded as event rewards; the cap cannot be bypassed by stacking multiple refresh items in a single sitting.

Activities that award progression materials, such as modules for character building or crafting components, are always the ones that charge City Stamina. Activities whose rewards are purely monetary past a hard weekly cap become stamina-free once that cap is hit, letting a player continue to farm for fun without reducing the budget available for progression-material runs.

Stamina Cap Progression

The City Stamina cap is tied directly to the City Tycoon level. Each major tycoon milestone raises the ceiling; a player climbing from early unlocks to mid-game pushes the cap from a few hundred into the high hundreds. Reported cap unlocks from a two-week closed beta playthrough, from lowest to current, are recorded below.

Higher cap values past 700 are possible on longer playthroughs; the exact ceiling depends on how far the tycoon track runs, with a maximum rank of 45 exposed in the latest closed beta. The cap grows smoothly, so a player need not rush a specific milestone to unlock the next bracket; the raises happen automatically as tycoon level ticks up.

Cafe Ownership

Cafes are acquired directly at the cafe venue rather than through the estate-agent flow used for houses and apartments. Walking into an unowned cafe exposes a purchase prompt; once bought, the cafe becomes the player's passive Fon generator and is managed entirely from the City Tycoon menu.

Deploying Characters as Staff

Any pulled character can be assigned to a cafe as staff. Deployed characters generate Fon income in the background while the player is out exploring, on a commission, or logged out; income accrues until the player withdraws it manually from the cafe dashboard. Staff assignments rotate like a roster, so multiple cafes can run simultaneously if the player owns more than one.

Manager Responsibilities

The player acts as the cafe manager. Two restock options are offered when inventory runs low: pay an extra fee for a quick delivery that refills inventory on the spot, or shop in person at the supplier to save the fee at the cost of travel time. The two paths let the player trade Fons for time depending on their current priority.

Food Slots and Cafe Level

Each cafe has a limited number of food slots that accept menu items for sale. Food slots upgrade as the cafe levels, and higher-tier dishes slot into the same board yield more income per customer than starter recipes. Upgrading the cafe therefore compounds with staff bond bonuses and menu investment, rather than replacing any single axis.

Management Load in the Latest Beta

An earlier beta cycle had active cafe incidents, with customers occasionally causing trouble that required the player to drop what they were doing and head to the cafe in person. The current beta removed those interruptions to reduce management load. The tradeoff is intentional: with more hobby activities competing for attention in the same build, the cafe layer was simplified to stay passive in the background while the player focused on driving, racing, heists, and exploration.

Cheese Milestone and Dupe Farming

City Tycoon level 18 is the single most talked-about milestone in the progression track because it awards Chiz, an S-rank character also transliterated as Cheese in some community tier lists. She is delivered in full through the tycoon track; no gacha pull is required to add her to the roster.

Continuing to level the tycoon track past 18 unlocks her duplicate copies and her preferred Arc weapon. The cadence is the same: each additional tycoon level deposits another dupe or her signature weapon as a milestone reward. Because duplicates in this game progress Awakening effects, a player willing to farm the tycoon track can fully max her awakening and equip her with her signature weapon without ever pulling on a character or weapon banner.

This flow is presented as the game's alternative to banner-only character progression: the real money loop built into the City Tycoon hobby system doubles as the character-progression source for Chiz, so the two halves of the game feed each other. For players who prefer to earn their S-rank over rolling for it, the level 18 path is the intended route.

Chiz Combat Fons Income

Beyond unlocking Chiz at level 18, the City Tycoon track unlocks her secondary income role. Chiz's Exiled Swordplay branch attack deals Cosmos damage and grants both Grain (her combat resource) and Fons on hit, with a bonus Fons payout when the branch attack defeats the target. The combat-derived Fons payout sits behind a weekly cap that scales with City Tycoon level: the cap starts at 250,000 Fons at the level 18 unlock and rises to 500,000 Fons at City Tycoon level 25. The cap refreshes on the same weekly cycle as the rest of the City Stamina hobby pool, so claiming the full payout is a one-attempt-per-week task once Chiz can clear enough mobs to hit it.

This is the mechanic that makes Chiz the highest-impact early-game DPS for accounts that intend to farm Tycoon: every combat session she runs deposits direct currency into the same wallet that funds property upgrades, vehicle purchases, and cafe restocks. Pairing Chiz with her signature Contemplative Cat arc is the natural follow-up, since the arc explicitly scales her damage with the player's current Fons total, capping the bonus at one million Fons. The cap on the arc rewards holding a large balance during boss fights rather than spending immediately, so a focused Tycoon player can run Chiz on a steady cycle of "farm Fons in combat, hold the balance through the next boss, spend after" without the two halves competing.

Practically, prioritize the level 18 unlock to start the combat-Fons faucet, then keep climbing toward level 25 to double the weekly cap. The cap is shared per account, not per character, so even players who have an alternate carry will want Chiz on the field for the weekly cap claim before swapping back to their preferred composition.

Cafe Restock Cadence

When inventory at a player-owned cafe runs low, the manager dashboard offers two restock durations rather than one fixed amount. The choice changes how flexible the cafe stays as the player levels their tycoon track and unlocks new menu tiers, and the practical recommendation depends on whether the player expects to swap menu items soon.

A common early-game mistake is to overcommit to apple pies on a 24-hour restock right before the dashboard unlocks higher-tier dishes such as tuna sandwiches. Apples are then locked into a dish whose payout is dwarfed by the new menu, and the leftover stock cannot be redirected. Switching to four-hour restocks the day before a tycoon level milestone avoids this.

Per-Stamina Fons Conversion Rate

Hethereau Hobbies activities convert City Stamina into Fons at a roughly fixed rate of 1,000 Fons per City Stamina point spent. The number is consistent across stamina-charging activities, so City Delivery, Swift Travel, and Owner's Selection produce comparable income on a per-stamina basis even though their per-run payouts and time costs vary. Picking which hobby to run on a given day is therefore mostly a question of which one the player enjoys, not which one is the most efficient. The exception is Pink Paws Heist, which has a hard weekly Fons cap and becomes free of stamina cost after that cap is hit.

Activities that pay out progression materials (modules, Arcs, dice fragments) always charge stamina. Activities that pay out only Fons after a hard weekly cap stop charging stamina once that cap is hit, which keeps casual play from cannibalizing the stamina budget needed for the material loops. Plan the week so that material-bearing runs hit first, then drop into pure-Fons activities once the City Stamina budget winds down.

Character-Locked Anomaly Furniture

Some pieces of anomaly furniture in the property system are gated behind owning a specific playable character. Activating these pieces on the player's apartment, mansion, or villa surfaces a permission check that fails until the named character is in the player's roster, at which point the piece becomes craftable and placeable like any other anomaly furniture. The character does not need to be deployed in combat or assigned to a cafe; simply having the unit unlocked is enough.

The clearest example is a piece tied to Hathor. When activated, that piece produces Module drops on a daily reset cycle. The player picks up the day's drop from the furniture without spending stamina, and the piece's drop quality scales with its upgrade level. Maximum upgrades award gold-rarity Modules, which are the same tier the Rabbit Hole Hard difficulty awards on a stamina-paid pull. In effect, the furniture is a stamina-free top-up on the Console gearing loop for any account that has Hathor unlocked.

Other character-locked pieces follow the same pattern but offer different rewards. The full set of character-keyed pieces has not been documented in a single place, but the activation panel surfaces the gating character on each piece, so players can scout the catalogue from any apartment and decide whether the unlock requirement is worth the long-term passive payout.

The practical implication for the S-Rank Selector decision is that picking a character is not purely a combat choice. Some standard-pool S-ranks unlock these passive faucets, and skipping them on the selector means losing access to the matching faucet until the player either pulls them on the standard banner or buys them with Warp Pieces from the exchange shop. Hathor is the most-cited example because Module income compounds across every character build the player ever runs, but the broader rule is that character-locked anomaly furniture is part of the long-term value calculation when picking selector targets.

City Stamina Caps by Tycoon Level (Early Brackets)

The City Stamina weekly cap raises automatically as the player climbs the City Tycoon track, but the early-bracket thresholds are tied to specific tycoon levels rather than smooth scaling. Capturing the launch-window cap on the same week the player crosses a tycoon level lets them claim every available stamina point against the weekly Fons conversion rate of 1,000 Fons per stamina.

Higher cap brackets continue to scale into the 500 to 700 range across the rest of the tycoon track and onward to the maximum exposed rank. The early jumps from 100 to 200 (at Level 5) and 200 to 350 (at Level 10) are the largest single-step cap increases on the path, so timing weekly stamina spending for the days immediately after each milestone unlock is the most efficient way to ride the cap raises into Fons income.

Pink Paws Heist also unlocks at City Tycoon Level 10 alongside the 350 stamina cap, so a player who pushes both milestones in the same week can stack the new heist's high per-run Fons payout on top of the larger weekly stamina budget. The combination is one of the largest single-week income jumps available on the tycoon track.

Key Level Break-Points

Two early City Tycoon levels matter more than the rest, and a steady cadence past one of them keeps unlocking the same character without a single gacha pull. The two break-points are Level 16 (the largest single quality-of-life jump in the early track) and Level 18 (the milestone that delivers Chiz, a free S-Rank Cosmos main DPS). After Level 18, every third tycoon level through Level 45 deposits an additional Chiz copy and a copy of her signature weapon as milestone rewards.

Treat Level 16 as the highest-impact early break-point: at that rank, City Stamina cost per use rises by 100%, the weekly cap is raised again, and the weekly reset payouts grow. Because every City Stamina point converts to roughly 1,000 Fons before bonus modifiers, doubling the cost-per-use turns each City Delivery, Fishing, or Street Racing run into a much larger raw Fons payout for the same time investment. Players who can clear the Level 16 mission steps in the first week of the run get the rest of the tycoon track at a higher Fons-per-stamina rate, which compounds over every subsequent weekly reset.

Level 18 is the first roster milestone. Hitting it adds Chiz to the playable roster as a free S-Rank Cosmos main DPS without any gacha or weapon banner pulls. From Level 18 onward, every additional three tycoon levels through the Level 45 cap awards another Chiz duplicate or her signature weapon copy on the same milestone schedule. Because duplicates progress her Awakening effects in this game, a tycoon-focused account can fully max her Awakening and equip her with her signature weapon entirely through City Tycoon progression.

The +3 cadence is consistent: each tycoon level past 18 that lands on the cycle deposits one additional Chiz milestone (either a character duplicate or a signature weapon copy) until the Level 45 cap. The exact split between dupe deliveries and weapon deliveries on each level has not been published as a fixed table; the pattern observed in the closed beta was a one-of-each per +3 levels through the maximum rank, which by Level 45 fully completes both the Chiz Awakening track and her signature weapon track for accounts that climb the full ladder.

Tycoon Level up Requirements

Each City Tycoon level uses a fixed checklist of gating requirements rather than a single experience bar. The five categories that appear on every level's mission card are:

The asymmetry between the requirement categories is intentional. Footprint Points, vehicles, House Comfort, and Exploration Guide levels are largely self-paced and tend to clear on schedule from regular play. The Fons total is the gating requirement on most rank-ups, which is why players targeting Level 16 or Level 18 in the first week prioritize stamina-charging Hethereau Hobbies (especially City Delivery) and the biweekly Pink Paws Heist payout. Note that piling up Fons alone does not advance the tycoon track: each tycoon level still requires its specific mission steps to be marked complete, so plan each session around the next pinned mission first and treat Fons farming as the supporting loop.

Hunter Exchange and Beetle Box Connection

Two of the post-launch upgrade loops that gate Beetle Coins income depend directly on City Tycoon progression. The Hunter Exchange resets monthly, and the amount of spiderwood it sells per cycle scales with the player's tycoon level: a higher rank exposes more spiderwood per reset rather than unlocking a flat new vendor. Spiderwood is the upgrade material for the Beetle Box furniture, which is the daily Beetle Coin generator placed in late-game apartments.

The Beetle Box has a hard structural cap: it stays at level 3 unless the player owns both the 1.4 million Fons apartment and the 2 million Fons apartment. Both apartments are required to push the Beetle Box past level 3, since each apartment exposes a different shard of the upgrade path. Because the property purchases are themselves City Tycoon spend, the Beetle Box becomes a tycoon-gated loop end-to-end: tycoon level controls the spiderwood supply, and tycoon-funded property purchases gate the cap. A focused tycoon climb therefore unlocks both the daily Beetle Coin trickle and the apartment chain that lets it scale past level 3.

Mailbox Upgrades

The mailbox unlocked with the Eden apartment (and the second-cheapest property on) is upgraded by completing City Delivery runs. The mailbox is leveled from 1 toward its cap by total deliveries completed, not by per-delivery payout, so it is acceptable to take lower-paying deliveries when chasing the next mailbox tier. The mysterious cargo delivery weekly that the mailbox grants is the standout reward: it does not consume City Stamina, which makes it a strict-add weekly Fons payout on top of the standard stamina-charging delivery loop. Maxing the mailbox before claiming the free weekly is the recommended order, since each mailbox tier raises the payout the free weekly delivery awards.