NTE Scarborough Fair Explained: How Pity Actually Works

NTE Scarborough Fair Explained: How Pity Actually Works

If you are coming to Neverness to Everness from Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail, or Wuthering Waves, the gacha system is going to feel unfamiliar. NTE does not use a standard pull screen. It uses a board-game mechanic called Scarborough Fair, and underneath that board sit four completely independent pity counters that most players do not realize they need to track separately.

This guide breaks down exactly how every counter works, when soft pity kicks in, what carries over between banners, and why manual tracking gets messy fast.

What Is Scarborough Fair?

Scarborough Fair is NTE's gacha system, and it works nothing like a typical wish screen. Instead of tapping a "pull" button and watching an animation, you are looking at an actual game board.

You spend Solid Dice to roll. Each roll moves a Chuppa token across tiles on the board. Every tile the token lands on gives you a reward. Those rewards can include:

• Character shards for assembling or upgrading characters
• Skin fragments for glider skins, car skins, or character outfits
• Currency like Annulith or other in-game resources
• S-rank prizes — the featured limited character or high-value items

The key difference from every other gacha game is that the pull is visual and interactive. You see the board layout. You see which tiles contain which rewards. You watch your Chuppa token advance tile by tile. This is not a cosmetic wrapper around a random number generator — the board structure itself changes based on your pity state, which we will get into below.

Think of it like a monopoly board where every space is a gacha reward and the dice cost premium currency. The board is the banner.

The 4 Pity Counters You Are Actually Tracking

Here is where most players get tripped up. Scarborough Fair does not have one pity counter. It has four, and they are all independent of each other.

1. Character pity — Soft pity at 70, hard pity at 90. This is the main counter. It tracks your progress toward the featured S-rank limited character.
2. Glider skin pity — Hard pity at 50. Guarantees the featured glider skin that appears on the banner.
3. Car skin pity — Hard pity at 120. Guarantees the featured car skin.
4. Character skin pity — Hard pity at 200. Guarantees the featured character outfit or costume.

The critical thing to understand is that pulling a character does NOT reset your skin pities. Each counter advances independently. If you hit your S-rank character at pull 75, your glider skin counter is still sitting at 75/50 (meaning you already passed guarantee and received it), your car skin counter is at 75/120, and your character skin counter is at 75/200.

This is simultaneously more generous and more complex than other gacha systems. You are guaranteed multiple reward types across a single banner cycle, but you need to track where you stand on all four tracks to make informed decisions about when to stop pulling.

Soft Pity at 70 — What Actually Changes

NTE's soft pity is not a hidden rate increase buried in the fine print. It is a visible transformation of the board itself.

Before soft pity (pulls 1-69):

• S-rank tiles appear on roughly 1.88% of all tiles on the board
• That translates to about 1 S-rank tile in every 53 tiles
• Your odds of hitting the featured character on any given pull are low

After soft pity kicks in (pulls 70+):

• The board restructures. Approximately every 5-6 tiles becomes an S-rank tile
• The effective S-rank rate jumps to roughly 19.59%
• The board literally changes visually — you will see significantly more golden or highlighted S-rank tiles populating the layout

This is not subtle. When you cross into soft pity territory, the board looks dramatically different. More golden tiles, more S-rank opportunities, a visibly transformed layout. NTE made the rate increase something you can actually see, which is a refreshing design choice compared to games where soft pity is an invisible statistical nudge.

Because of this aggressive soft pity ramp, most players will hit their S-rank character between pulls 70 and 80. Actually reaching the hard pity ceiling of 90 is relatively uncommon. Budget your Solid Dice accordingly — if you have enough for 80 pulls, you are very likely to walk away with the character.

No 50/50 — What This Really Means

This is the single biggest difference between NTE and most competing gacha games, and it deserves its own section because of how dramatically it changes your pull math.

When you hit character pity in NTE, you always get the featured limited character. There is no 50/50 mechanic. No "losing" to a standard banner character. No needing a second pity cycle to guarantee the unit you want.

If you have been playing Genshin Impact or Honkai: Star Rail, you know the pain of losing a 50/50. You save for months, hit pity, and get Qiqi instead of the character you wanted. Then you need to hit pity again for the guarantee. That doubles your worst-case cost.

NTE eliminates that entirely. Your worst case is 90 pulls. Period.

Here is how NTE stacks up against the competition:

| Game | Hard Pity | 50/50? | True Worst Case | |---|---|---|---| | Neverness to Everness | 90 | No | 90 pulls | | Genshin Impact | 90 | Yes | 180 pulls | | Honkai: Star Rail | 90 | Yes | 180 pulls | | Wuthering Waves | 80 | Yes | 160 pulls |

The difference is enormous. NTE's true worst case is half of Genshin's and just over half of Wuthering Waves'. When you combine this with the aggressive soft pity starting at 70, the realistic cost of getting a featured character in NTE is significantly lower than any of its direct competitors.

For free-to-play and low-spending players, this is a game-changer. You can realistically plan to get every character you want without the anxiety of a coin flip at the finish line.

Pity Carryover Rules

Understanding carryover is where most players start making expensive mistakes. Each of the four counters follows different carryover rules, and confusing them will cost you pulls.

Character pity carries over between limited character banners. This is straightforward and works the way you would expect. If you spent 40 pulls on Nanally's banner without hitting the S-rank, and Nanally's banner ends, your next limited character banner starts at 40/90. Your progress is preserved.

Skin pities are banner-type specific, not universal. This is the part people get wrong. Your glider skin pity carries forward only to the next banner that features a glider skin of the same type. If you built up 30/50 on glider skin pity during Nanally's banner, that 30/50 carries to the next banner that includes a glider skin return — but that might not be the very next limited banner.

Standard banner pity is completely separate from limited banner pity. Pulls on the permanent/standard banner do not affect your limited banner counters in any way, and vice versa.

Here is a concrete example to make this crystal clear:

You pull 40 times on Nanally's limited banner. You do not get her. Nanally's banner ends, and Lydia's limited banner begins.

• Your character pity is now 40/90 on Lydia's banner. You only need 50 more pulls (at most) to guarantee Lydia.
• Your glider skin pity is at 30/50, but only if Lydia's banner also features a glider skin. If it does not, that 30 sits in storage until a banner with a glider skin appears.
• Your car skin pity and character skin pity follow the same rule — they carry forward only when the relevant skin type reappears on a future banner.

Why This Is Harder to Track Manually

On paper, four counters does not sound unmanageable. In practice, it becomes a headache fast. Here is why:

• Four different caps: 90, 50, 120, and 200. None of them are the same number, so you cannot use a single mental model.
• Different carryover rules: Character pity always carries. Skin pities only carry when the same skin type returns. Mixing these up means you think you are closer to a guarantee than you actually are — or further than you need to be.
• Banner rotation gaps: When banners rotate, you need to remember your exact count across all four tracks. If a glider skin does not appear for two banner cycles, are you going to remember your glider pity count from three banners ago?
• The cost of miscalculation is real: Thousands of Annulith wasted because you did not realize you were 5 pulls away from a guaranteed car skin, or because you thought your character pity carried to the standard banner (it did not).

Most players end up using spreadsheets, note apps, or just guessing. Guessing works until it does not, and when it fails, you either overspend or walk away from a guarantee you did not know you had.

Quick Reference Cheat Sheet

Bookmark this table. You will need it.

| Counter | Soft Pity | Hard Pity | Carries Over? | |---|---|---|---| | Character | 70 | 90 | Yes, between limited character banners | | Glider Skin | N/A | 50 | Same skin type returns only | | Car Skin | N/A | 120 | Same skin type returns only | | Character Skin | N/A | 200 | Same skin type returns only |

Key takeaways to remember:

• Soft pity only exists for the character counter (at pull 70)
• The three skin counters have no soft pity — you either hit it or you do not before the hard cap
• Character pity always carries between limited banners, no exceptions
• Skin pities are conditional on the same skin type reappearing
• Standard and limited banners are completely separate systems

Plan Your Pulls, Do Not Guess

The Scarborough Fair system is genuinely more generous than most gacha games on the market. No 50/50 means your worst case is someone else's average case. The visual board transformation at soft pity means you can see the odds shifting in your favor. And guaranteed skin drops at fixed intervals reward players who commit to a banner.

But that generosity comes with complexity. Four independent counters, conditional carryover, different caps — it is a lot to hold in your head across multiple banner cycles. The players who track this properly will stretch their Solid Dice further, hit more guarantees, and waste less currency than the ones who wing it.

NTETracker will handle all 4 pity counters automatically when we launch on April 29. Join the waitlist to get early access and never miscalculate your pulls again.