Short answer: if you’re chasing a specific S-Rank Esper in Neverness to Everness, the most you will ever spend is 90 pulls, worth 14,400 Riftcrystal, and that pull is guaranteed to be the exact character you wanted. There is no 50/50 coin-flip sitting on top of the rarity gamble the way there is in most HoYoverse-style gacha games. That single design choice changes the whole math of whether a pull is worth the money, and it’s the reason this game’s pity system is worth breaking down on its own rather than lumping it in with the usual 50/50 crowd.
Below is the full breakdown: the exact published pull rates, the soft-pity and hard-pity thresholds, a worked pity-cost table priced in both Riftcrystal and real dollars, a step-by-step expected-value walkthrough, and five spending scenarios so you can see where your own luck would land you. Every number here traces back to a cited source; where guides disagreed, the more conservative figure is used and the conflict is flagged.
What Is Neverness to Everness, and Why Is Its Gacha Different?
Neverness to Everness (commonly shortened to NTE) is an open-world action RPG developed by Hotta Studio and published by Perfect World Games, which launched globally on April 29, 2026. Characters in the game are called Espers, and like most live-service RPGs out of China, new Espers and weapons are distributed through a gacha system funded by a premium currency called Riftcrystal.
What sets NTE apart from the genre’s dominant template (the one Genshin Impact popularized and Honkai: Star Rail and Zenless Zone Zero both copy) is the absence of a 50/50 mechanic on its limited character banner. In those other games, landing an S-Rank or 5-star doesn’t guarantee the featured unit. You get a 50% shot at the character you actually want, and if you lose that coin flip, you’re stuck starting a second pity cycle from zero. NTE’s limited banner skips that step entirely. According to gacha guides from Icy Veins and the community-run Pocket Tactics, any S-Rank Esper you pull on a limited banner in NTE is the featured character, full stop. No second roll, no off-banner unit, no coin flip.
The Exact Pull Rates: Base Odds for S-Rank Espers
The base rate for pulling an S-Rank Esper on NTE’s limited character banner is 0.99% per pull. That figure is consistent across multiple independent guide sites, including Icy Veins, BlueStacks, the community wiki at nte.wiki, and Sportskeeda’s gacha breakdown. A smaller set of guides report a different figure (1.87%) for what appears to be a different banner category, so 0.99% is the better-supported number and the one used throughout this piece.
Below the S-Rank tier sits the A-Rank, NTE’s second-highest rarity. The base A-Rank rate is 11.67%, and critically, an A-Rank-or-higher pull is guaranteed on every 10th pull if you haven’t already hit one, according to both nte.wiki and Sportskeeda’s guide. So a single 10-pull never comes back completely empty-handed, even on a bad run.
Those are flat, unweighted odds. In practice almost nobody experiences a flat 0.99% chance all the way through, because the pity system kicks in and reshapes the curve well before you’d need pure luck to bail you out.
Soft Pity vs. Hard Pity: How the Safety Net Works
NTE uses the same two-stage pity structure as most of its competitors, just with tighter numbers. Soft pity begins at pull 70. Once you cross that threshold without an S-Rank, your per-pull odds jump sharply, to at least 19.59% according to Icy Veins, BlueStacks, and nte.wiki, and continue climbing with each subsequent pull. Hard pity then caps the whole system at pull 90: if you somehow haven’t pulled an S-Rank by then, the 90th pull is guaranteed to produce one.
One more detail matters as much as the thresholds themselves: pity carries over between limited banners. If you’re sitting at 55 pulls with no S-Rank when a banner rotates, you start the next limited banner at 55, not zero. That carryover is confirmed by Icy Veins, nte.wiki, and Pocket Tactics, and it means a string of bad luck on one banner isn’t wasted the moment the calendar flips.
No 50/50: Why NTE Skips the Coin-Flip Most Gacha Games Use
This is the single biggest fairness distinction in NTE’s system, so it’s worth stating plainly. In a 50/50 game, hitting pity only guarantees “an S-Rank,” not “the S-Rank you wanted.” Lose that 50% roll and you’re locked into the standard pool instead, with your pity counter reset and a second climb ahead of you. Zenless Zone Zero is a clean example: its limited Agent banner also runs a 90-pull hard pity, but because it pairs that with a 50/50, a player who loses the coin flip can be staring down a worst-case total of 180 pulls, worth 28,800 Polychrome, before the featured Agent is guaranteed, according to banner guides at BitTopup.
NTE removes that entire second branch. Ninety pulls is not just the hard-pity threshold, it’s the absolute ceiling on what it costs to get the specific Esper you’re after. There’s no version of bad luck in this system that doubles your spend. That doesn’t make the game cheap, and it doesn’t mean the base odds are generous, but it does mean the worst-case outcome is predictable and bounded in a way that a 50/50 system structurally cannot be.
How Riftcrystal and Pull Costs Work
Every pull in NTE, regardless of which banner you’re pulling on, costs 160 Annulith, and Riftcrystal (the only currency you can actually buy with real money) converts to Annulith at a flat 1:1 rate. In practical terms, that means every single pull costs 160 Riftcrystal, and a 10-pull costs 1,600 Riftcrystal. That 160-per-pull cost is confirmed independently by NTE Guide, GamingOnPhone, and GameWith’s own in-game purchases breakdown, so it’s about as solid a number as this piece has to work with.
Those Annulith/Dice tickets are banner-specific labels (Solid Dice for the limited Esper banner, Fabricated Dice for the standard banner, Tri-Keys for the Arc weapon banner), but the underlying cost is identical across all three: 160 currency per roll. That consistency makes the math below straightforward to apply no matter which banner you’re budgeting for.
The Pity-Cost Table: What Each Milestone Costs in Riftcrystal and Dollars
Here is the full cost breakdown at every meaningful milestone in the limited-character pity cycle. The dollar figures use the best available real-money exchange rate: the $99.99 top-up tier, which GameWith and VGTopup both confirm grants 6,480 Riftcrystal plus a 1,600 bonus for a total of 8,080, works out to roughly $0.0124 per Riftcrystal, or about $1.98 per pull. That’s the cheapest rate the published packages support, so it’s used as the baseline below rather than a smaller, less efficient tier.
| Pulls | Riftcrystal Spent | Approx. USD (best rate) | Cumulative Odds of S-Rank | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 160 | $1.98 | 0.99% | Single roll |
| 10 | 1,600 | $19.80 | ~9.47% | Guaranteed A-Rank-or-better |
| 30 | 4,800 | $59.41 | ~25.79% | Flat-rate zone |
| 50 | 8,000 | $99.02 | ~39.21% | Flat-rate zone |
| 69 | 11,040 | $136.64 | ~49.67% | Last pull before soft pity |
| 70 | 11,200 | $138.62 | Rate jumps to 19.59%+ | Soft pity begins |
| 80 | 12,800 | $158.43 | Climbing | Arc banner’s featured-guarantee point |
| 90 | 14,400 | $178.23 | 100% | Hard pity – guaranteed featured Esper, no coin flip |
One practical wrinkle: because top-up packages come in fixed denominations, you can’t buy exactly 14,400 Riftcrystal. In practice, reaching any milestone from pull 70 onward (11,200 Riftcrystal or more) requires buying two of the $99.99 bundles, for a real-world total of $199.98 and 16,160 Riftcrystal, with the leftover carrying into your next banner. That’s the number to budget against if you’re planning to go the distance, not the theoretical $178.23.
Step-by-Step Expected Value: What a Guarantee Actually Costs
Here’s the expected-value math broken into steps, using only the cited 0.99% base rate and the pity thresholds above.
- Step 1 – flat-rate expectation. For a simple geometric distribution with no pity system at all, the expected number of pulls to hit a 0.99% event is 1 ÷ 0.0099, or roughly 101 pulls. That’s the baseline a fully random, uncapped system would produce.
- Step 2 – the pity system beats that baseline. NTE never actually lets you reach 101 pulls of bad luck. Soft pity starts reshaping the odds at pull 70, and hard pity forces a guaranteed hit at pull 90. So the real expected number of pulls is lower than the flat-rate math suggests, bounded above by 90.
- Step 3 – the no-50/50 rule removes the second variable entirely. In a 50/50 game, the EV calculation needs a second term for the 50% chance you have to repeat the entire cycle. NTE doesn’t have that term. The 90-pull ceiling applies to the exact Esper you want, not just “an” S-Rank.
- Step 4 – the dollar ceiling. Combine Steps 2 and 3: the maximum you will ever need to spend to guarantee a specific featured Esper is 14,400 Riftcrystal, which realistically costs $199.98 once you account for package denominations. There is no unlucky outcome in this system that pushes that number higher.
That $199.98 ceiling is the number worth remembering. It’s not cheap, but it’s a hard ceiling rather than a probabilistic one, which is the opposite of how most competing gacha systems are built.
The Arc (Weapon) Banner: A Separate, Faster Pity Track
Weapons in NTE are called Arcs, and they’re pulled on a separate banner using Tri-Keys rather than the Esper banner’s Solid Dice, though the underlying cost is still 160 Riftcrystal per pull. The Arc banner’s base S-Class rate is 3%, roughly three times the character banner’s 0.99%, and it runs its own two-stage guarantee system according to nte.wiki and Sportskeeda’s gacha guide.
| Milestone | Pulls | Riftcrystal Cost | What’s Guaranteed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Base rate | Any single pull | 160 | 3% chance of an S-Class Arc |
| Arc floor | 60 | 9,600 | Some S-Class Arc (not necessarily featured) |
| Featured Arc guarantee | 80 | 12,800 | The specific featured Arc |
The two-tier structure here (a 60-pull floor for any S-Class Arc, then an 80-pull guarantee for the specific featured one) is NTE’s version of a soft landing: you’re never fully empty-handed by pull 60, and you’re never stuck gambling on a coin flip to get the one you actually want by pull 80.
A-Rank Guarantees and the 10-Pull Floor
It’s worth separating out the A-Rank guarantee because it changes how a single 10-pull should be evaluated. At an 11.67% base rate, A-Rank Espers are common enough that most 10-pulls produce one anyway, but the guarantee removes the worst-case scenario: by the rules documented at nte.wiki and Sportskeeda, pull 10 forces an A-Rank-or-higher result if the first nine didn’t produce one. A single 10-pull, in other words, is never a total loss, even if the S-Rank doesn’t show up.
How Riftcrystal Pricing Works (and the Cheapest Way to Reach Pity)
NTE sells Riftcrystal through six top-up tiers, according to pricing guides on GameWith and VGTopup. The table below lists the base amount granted at each price point and the effective rate per 1,000 Riftcrystal, which is the cleanest way to compare value across tiers.
| USD Price | Riftcrystal Granted | Rate per 1,000 Riftcrystal |
|---|---|---|
| $0.99 | 60 | $16.50 |
| $4.99 | 300 | $16.63 |
| $14.99 | 980 | $15.30 |
| $29.99 | 1,980 | $15.15 |
| $49.99 | 3,280 | $15.24 |
| $99.99 | 6,480 (8,080 with confirmed +1,600 bonus) | $12.38 (using the 8,080 total) |
The pattern here is the same one that shows up in almost every gacha monetization system: the top tier is disproportionately better value than the smaller ones. The $99.99 package is roughly 20-25% cheaper per unit of currency than any tier below it, which is why the hard-pity cost estimates above all assume that’s the bundle being bought.
Worked Examples: Five Real Spending Scenarios
Numbers in a table are abstract until you put a player in front of them. Here are five realistic outcomes, using only the cited rates above.
- Scenario 1: The early hit. A player does a single 10-pull and lands the featured S-Rank on pull 7. Cost: roughly 1,120 Riftcrystal, about $13.86 at the best rate, or realistically the cost of one $14.99 package. This happens for a minority of players, since the cumulative odds by pull 10 are only about 9.47%.
- Scenario 2: Middling luck. A player pulls 50 times with no S-Rank, a scenario that affects roughly 60.79% of pullers, and hits on pull 51. Cost through pull 50: 8,000 Riftcrystal, covered by a single $99.99 bundle.
- Scenario 3: Reaching soft pity. A player crosses pull 70 without an S-Rank, joining the roughly 50.33% of pullers still empty-handed at that point. From here the odds jump to at least 19.59% per pull. Cost so far: 11,200 Riftcrystal, which requires two $99.99 bundles ($199.98) since no single package covers it.
- Scenario 4: Full hard pity, worst case. A player pulls all the way to 90 with no luck at all. The 90th pull is forced to produce the featured Esper. Total cost: 14,400 Riftcrystal, realistically $199.98 once package denominations are accounted for. Critically, this is also the absolute ceiling, there is no scenario in NTE where this player needs to spend more than that for this specific character.
- Scenario 5: Chasing both an Esper and its signature Arc. A player hard-pities the Esper (90 pulls, 14,400 Riftcrystal) and separately pulls the featured Arc at its 80-pull guarantee (12,800 Riftcrystal) on the weapon banner. Combined worst-case cost: 27,200 Riftcrystal, which realistically runs to about $349.97 in real-money packages (three $99.99 bundles plus a $49.99 bundle, covering 27,520 Riftcrystal with a small amount left over).
How NTE’s Pity System Compares to Genshin-Style 50/50 Games
The comparison that matters most for anyone deciding whether a pull is worth the money is the worst case, not the average case. In Zenless Zone Zero, hard pity also lands at 90 pulls, but because of the 50/50, a player who loses that roll needs to climb a second 90-pull cycle before the featured Agent is guaranteed, for a worst-case total of 180 pulls and 28,800 Polychrome, according to banner guides at BitTopup. NTE’s worst case for the equivalent scenario is 90 pulls and 14,400 Riftcrystal, exactly half.
That doesn’t automatically make NTE “cheaper” in every sense, since base rates, banner frequency, and how often new featured units are released all affect the real cost of staying current. But on the specific question this piece set out to answer (what’s the most you could possibly pay to guarantee one specific unit), removing the 50/50 cuts the worst-case ceiling in half. That’s the clearest, most literal way a gacha system can be more predictable without changing its headline drop rate at all.
Myths vs. Facts About NTE’s Gacha Fairness
Myth: No 50/50 means the system must be rigged to be stingier elsewhere. Fact: NTE’s base S-Rank rate (0.99%) is actually higher than the 0.6% base rate used by Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail, and Zenless Zone Zero, even without the 50/50 safety net removed. The two mechanics (base rate and rate-up guarantee) are independent design choices, not a trade-off against each other.
Myth: Pity resets whenever a banner changes. Fact: pity carries over between limited character banners, confirmed by Icy Veins, nte.wiki, and Pocket Tactics. A near-miss on one banner isn’t wiped out when a new one launches.
Myth: “No coin flip” means pulling is basically free or risk-free. Fact: you can still spend up to 14,400 Riftcrystal, realistically $199.98, chasing one unit. Removing the 50/50 bounds the worst case, it doesn’t eliminate the cost.
Myth: Every gacha game with a 90-pull hard pity works the same way. Fact: the pull count tells you nothing about whether a 50/50 sits on top of it. Two games can share the identical “90-pull hard pity” headline and have a worst-case cost that differs by 2x, exactly the gap between NTE and ZZZ above.
Myth: Soft pity odds in these games are never officially disclosed. Fact: in NTE’s case, the soft-pity start (pull 70) and the escalated rate (19.59%+) are consistently reported across multiple independent gacha-tracking sites, which is more transparency than many competing games offer around their own soft-pity curves.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Neverness to Everness have a 50/50 system?
No. Any S-Rank Esper pulled on the limited character banner is guaranteed to be the featured character. There is no secondary roll against a standard pool.
How many pulls does it take to guarantee the featured S-Rank Esper?
90 pulls, which is NTE’s hard-pity threshold. Because there’s no 50/50, that pull is guaranteed to be the specific featured character, not just any S-Rank.
When does soft pity start, and what does it change?
Soft pity begins at pull 70. From that point, the per-pull odds of an S-Rank rise from the 0.99% base rate to at least 19.59%, continuing to climb until hard pity guarantees a hit at pull 90.
How much does it cost in dollars to hard-pity a character?
The theoretical minimum at the best available top-up rate is about $178.23. In practice, because top-up packages only come in fixed denominations, reaching the full 14,400 Riftcrystal realistically costs $199.98, the price of two $99.99 bundles.
Does pity carry over if a banner ends before I reach it?
Yes. Your pity counter on the limited character banner carries forward into the next limited banner rather than resetting to zero.
How is the Arc (weapon) banner different from the character banner?
The Arc banner uses a higher 3% base rate for its top rarity and a two-stage guarantee: any S-Class Arc is guaranteed by pull 60, and the specific featured Arc is guaranteed by pull 80, both well below the character banner’s 90-pull ceiling.
Is NTE’s gacha system more fair than Genshin-style 50/50 games?
By the narrowest, most literal measure (the maximum possible cost to guarantee one specific unit) yes: removing the 50/50 cuts the worst-case pull count in half compared with a game like Zenless Zone Zero, which shares the same 90-pull hard pity but still requires a coin flip on top of it.
Is there a cheaper way to reach pity than buying the $99.99 bundle repeatedly?
Not according to the published top-up tiers. The $99.99 package consistently offers the lowest cost per unit of Riftcrystal (about $12.38 per 1,000 once its confirmed bonus is included), making it the most efficient way to stack currency toward any pity milestone.