Revision 10

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.

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.

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.