Drifting in Neverness to Everness is one of those skills that looks simple on paper and then immediately humbles you the first time you try it at full speed. The open streets of NTE give you plenty of room to practice, but the technique requires precise timing across three distinct steps. Get it right and you can carve through sharp corners without losing momentum. Get it wrong and you're spinning into a wall.
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How do you drift in Neverness to Everness?
Drifting in NTE breaks down into three sequential actions, and the order matters. According to the Game8 walkthrough team, here is the full process:
- Build up to full speed before you approach the corner. Attempting a drift at anything less than maximum speed makes the technique much harder to execute cleanly.
- Tap the handbrake and steer toward your turn direction at the same moment the corner arrives. The timing window here is tight. Tapping too early or too late means the car won't break traction the way you need it to.
- Countersteer immediately once the car starts skidding. This is the hardest part. You need to turn the wheel in the opposite direction of your drift to keep the car from spinning out, but only enough to stay on the road. Overcorrecting kills the drift entirely.
Neverness to Everness Guide: How to Drift
The third step is where most players struggle. Countersteering has to feel reactive rather than planned, which is why the source material notes it "will require practice." There's no shortcut here. Repetition on a quiet stretch of road is the only way to build the muscle memory.
How to set up a better practice environment
Before you spend 20 minutes getting clipped by NPC traffic mid-drift, adjust your traffic density settings. Setting traffic to Low in the game settings clears the roads enough to give you a clean run without constant interruptions. This is especially useful when you're still working on the countersteer timing and need unobstructed stretches to experiment.
Once the roads are quieter, find a long straight that feeds into a sharp corner and run the same turn repeatedly. The goal is to make the handbrake-and-steer input feel automatic before you worry about the countersteer.
Don't practice drifting in areas with heavy foot traffic or tight alleyways. The lack of road width makes recovery nearly impossible when the countersteer goes wrong.
What are the benefits of drifting in NTE?
The primary payoff is racing performance. Drifting lets you carry full speed through corners that would normally force you to brake, which translates directly to faster lap times in NTE's racing activities. A clean drift through a sharp bend beats braking and accelerating back up to speed every time.
That said, the technique is genuinely difficult to master. The source material describes it as "very tricky to pull off," so don't expect to be threading hairpins on your first session. Treat early attempts as practice runs rather than full race conditions.
Drifting is most relevant for NTE's racing hobby activities. If you're primarily focused on combat or exploration, it's a fun skill to have but not something that affects your progression.
What else should you know about driving in NTE?
Drifting is one piece of a larger driving system in NTE. The game has a full vehicle roster, racing stages, and City Tycoon activities that reward time spent behind the wheel. If you're working through the broader open-world content, check out the Neverness to Everness guide collection for tips on everything from character progression to how to ascend characters and raise your Hunter Rank, since a stronger roster makes the action side of NTE considerably smoother.
If you're just getting started and want to maximize your resources before grinding, the guide on how to get 120 free pulls at launch is worth reading before you spend anything. NTE rewards preparation, and the same patience that helps you nail the countersteer timing applies to how you manage your pulls and progression across the rest of the game.