Most of what New Eridu gives you happens away from a fight. You run a video store, you buy a coffee, you fill in a bingo card of errands, and it is easy to treat all of it as flavor and skip straight to Shiyu Defense. Skip it and you leave real rewards on the table every single week: Polychrome, W-Engine mats, and a stack of Denny you did not have to grind for.
So here is the honest version of the city, sorted by what it pays and how much of your attention it deserves. One of these systems is genuinely passive money. The rest are two-minute chores with outsized payouts. None of them are worth stressing over.
First, the myth to kill: there is no dispatch farm
If you came from Genshin or Honkai: Star Rail, you are used to expeditions: send characters out, come back later, collect materials on a timer. Zenless Zone Zero does not have that. The Scott Outpost is a menu, not a money printer, and the HIA Club is a training room. The only thing in the city that earns while you are logged off is the Random Play video store. Internalize that and you will stop hunting for an idle-income button that was never added.
Everything else in the city is either a daily buff you should collect or a weekly reward track you should finish. Here is each one.
Random Play: the only true passive income
Wise and Belle's video store on Sixth Street is the closest thing ZZZ has to an idle earner, and it is worth two taps a day. Talk to Bangboo 18 to open shop, then run it like this:
- Match the trending genres. The store shows a couple of trending genres in the corner. Slot up to three videotapes that hit them and your projected income per hour climbs. You can preview earnings and foot traffic before you commit.
- Lock it and leave. Once you open for business the tapes are locked until the next day, so pick well, then walk away. Dennies (and some Polychrome) accrue while you are gone.
- Collect every 24 hours. The store pays out on a daily cycle. Missing a collection just means the meter sits full, so there is no penalty beyond lost time.
- Use promoters. Recruiting an Agent at Friend trust, or a repeat NPC customer, as a promoter both boosts income and hands you a unique next-day gift: Bangboo patches, W-Engine batteries, basic chips, or a couple thousand Denny depending on who you use. Promoting wears down their mood, so rotate them.
It is not going to fund your pulls, but over a patch it quietly covers a meaningful chunk of your Denny and upgrade-material overhead, which is exactly the money you always run short on.
Ridu Weekly: the reward track people skip
Ridu Weekly is a bingo card of everyday errands, and it is the single most-skipped source of free Polychrome in the game. It resets Monday at 04:00 server time and runs the full week.
You earn points just by living in the city: log in, open the video store, play an arcade cabinet, scratch a lottery card at Howl's Newsstand, photograph a landmark, help out a Bangboo. Complete a full row, column, or diagonal and you trigger bonus point streaks, so the card fills faster than the individual tasks suggest.
The milestone payouts are the reason to bother:
| Points | Reward |
|---|---|
| 100 | Inter-Knot Credits + Inspiration |
| 200 | 15 Polychrome + Senior Investigation Logs |
| 600 | 15 Polychrome + W-Engine Energy Modules |
| 800 | 15 Polychrome + Drive Disc EXP |
| 1000 | Inspiration + 10,000 Denny |
| 1200 | Inspiration + 10,000 Denny |
That is 45 Polychrome and 20,000 Denny a week for chores you were half-doing anyway. Do not confuse this board with Hollow Zero's Bounty Commissions, which are a separate weekly track paying Z-Merits for Casper's Shop. Both are worth finishing; they are just different windows.
The daily coffee: a free damage-material multiplier
The Coff Cafe (Sixth Street and Lumina Square, run by Tin Master) gives you one coffee per day, refreshing at daily reset. Two things come with it:
- Battery Charge back. Most coffees restore 60 Battery Charge; the Tin Master Special restores 80. That is a free extra farm run baked into your day.
- A doubled drop buff. Each coffee doubles the drop rate for one material category (certification seals, attack or defense components, physical chips, or a couple of Drive Disc runs). Pick the buff for whatever you are farming that day, drink it before you spend Battery Charge, and you effectively get two runs' worth of mats out of one.
Only one coffee buff is active at a time, so drink it right before your farming session, not first thing when you have nothing to spend it on. As of the current patch the coffee is free to order; it used to cost Denny, so if an older guide tells you to budget for it, ignore that.
Battery Charge: the stamina you keep overflowing
Everything active in the city and the endgame runs on Battery Charge, and understanding the reserve is what separates players who log in twice a day from players who never lose a point:
- Cap: 240, regenerating 1 every 6 minutes, so a full bar takes about 24 hours.
- Overflow banks. Anything above 240 (from coffee or Ether Batteries) pours into Backup Battery Charge, which holds up to 2,400 and can be drawn back into your main pool later. Auto-regen pauses while you are over 240, so topping past the cap with a battery is never wasted, it just gets stored.
- Where it goes: Routine Cleanup for Drive Discs costs 60 a run, Combat Simulation for Agent and skill mats scales by tier, and Notorious Hunt continuations run around 30. With no boosters, 240 is roughly four farm runs, five once you add the coffee.
The practical rule: if you can log in once at reset and once in the evening, you will never overflow, and the Backup reserve covers the days you cannot.
Trust, the HIA Club, and what not to grind
Two systems look like recurring income and are not, so treat them correctly:
- Agent Trust has four levels per Agent, raised through that Agent's finite Trust Events, not a daily grind. The payoff is Polychrome, backstory, and a dynamic wallpaper at max. Do them when they appear; do not farm for them.
- The HIA Club is where Combat Simulation lives. It is Battery-gated active farming, the same as the rest of the endgame, just with a lobby.
Spend your attention on the video store, the coffee, and the Ridu card. Leave the rest to happen on its own.
The two-minute city routine
Fold all of it into the loop you already run for dailies:
- Collect and re-stock the video store (and its promoter gift).
- Order the day's coffee, matched to your farm target, right before you spend Battery Charge.
- Knock out one or two Ridu Weekly tasks as you go; the card fills itself over the week.
- Spend Battery Charge on Routine Cleanup or Combat Simulation, coffee buff active.
That is the whole city in two minutes. If you want the other half of the account, the part that actually decides who you build, start with the Polychrome and pull economy, then check where your Agents land on the ZZZ tier list before you commit that free Denny to anyone.
