Nivalis Nights Beginner Guide: Your First Week in Lowtown

By Mirela Constantin · Updated October 4, 2026

You start in a Lowtown apartment (404B, Sublevel 12, “dead centre of the Lowtown sprawl”) with 1,000 lims, an AI assistant called Ava, and a meeting you are already late for. Thaddeus Carminus is retiring, and his noodle bar on Meridian Market, Ramen Noir, is now yours. So is its 50,000-lim debt. Nothing is on a timer, so there is no rush. These are the things that save the most time in the first week.

Day one at Ramen Noir

The tutorial walks you through placing seating and setting today’s menu on the monitor at the venue. What it does not tell you:

• Start with one dish. Chicken noodle soup needs ramen, chicken and onions in equal amounts, and you already know the recipe. Customers in Meridian Market like the noodle, mushroom and meat tags, and the soup hits two of them.
• Add beer when you can. It needs a drinks machine from the hardware vendor in Meridian Market, plus wheat. A customer orders at most one dish and one drink, so a drink on the menu can nearly double what each customer pays.
• Buy for one or two days, not a week. Chicken spoils. A community guide suggests 30 chicken from the butcher and 30 onions and 30 ramen from the greengrocer as a first stock. Dump them into any cabinet in the bar.
• Raise the price. When the game tells you that you can change prices, push them up. If every seat is full at every rush, add 1 lim the next day. Stop when seats start to empty.

The keys nobody explains

The journal is the one to learn. Its vendor tab searches by item (“ramen”, “seeds”) and shows what each vendor you have met buys and sells, and at what price. Its people tab shows dialogue history and where to find someone, which matters because a bad answer in a conversation can fail a quest.

How the city opens up

The taxi map shows districts you cannot enter yet with “Need more achievement points to unlock this location.” Points come from almost everything small: visiting a district, eating at other restaurants, spotting graffiti, finding collectable menu cards and postcards, catching new fish. If a district stays locked, go do a few of those. The achievements page lists all 120 with how many players have each.

Each locked district on the map shows the number of points it needs next to a star (one early district needs 10). Once you have reached a district by taxi, train or boat, fast travel to it from the map. Note that each taxi rank has a fixed destination; read where a cab goes before you get in.

Free stuff lying around

• Bags on top of trash cans in every district hold seeds, ingredients and sometimes something valuable. One player found a watch worth hundreds of lims.
• Colourful menu-sized papers on crates and benches are collectable menu cards. They can teach recipes.
• Your starting apartment’s furniture can be sold. Several players strip everything but the bed on day one for starting cash.
• A rusty fishing rod is free from Ady at the Docks. See the fishing guide.

Traps in the first week

1. Hiring a manager too early. At launch, managers overbought stock and drained cash. A developer patch fixed the duplicate ordering bug around October 2, but players still keep about 1,000 lims in the bank so the manager can buy ingredients. More in staff and managers.
2. Adding dishes too fast. Every new dish means new ingredients to store and lose to spoilage. Four or five dishes that share ingredients is plenty.
3. Tables in the noodle bar. Servers walk around the counter three times per table customer. Bar stools are cheaper and much faster to serve.
4. Rotten food in the fridge. Cooks use fresh stock first, and a fridge full of rotten food can stop the bar cooking at all. Sell spoiled stock (it goes for 0 lims) to clear it.
5. Being out late by accident. Curfew fines are small, around 50 to 60 lims, but they add up. Read the curfew guide before you try anything after dark.

You also have to eat and sleep

There are hunger and sleep bars. They are not a big burden: one meal a day and a bed (yours, a public shelter, or the bench on your boat) keeps you going.

Quests can wait

Quests have no time limit, so you can ignore the list for days and run the bar. Talking to people and doing quests does unlock recipes, though, and one early side quest pays far more than noodles ever will. See how to make money.