Alright, so this post will have the purpose of helping all you new players who have a lot of questions and are not sure where to start – I have been where you are and I also have a solid idea for how I would do it if I were to create a new account nowadays, after having reached MR20 already and with the game knowledge that journey has given me. My hope is that I can now pass this knowledge on to all of you, new to the game, in one compact and summarized post on this website :D

Resources & farming

Most new players that didn’t just start but have played a bit on their own – as well as a lot of higher-ranked players often search for best places to farm, check out our extensive resources guide to find what you’re looking for – all in one and the same place!

Farming setup

To make the most out of any farming scenario, you usually want to go with “proper farm setup”, which includes 3-4 specific warframes that each one fill a different designated role: Hydroid, Nekros, Trinity (, Nova/Rhino). Now I have covered this earlier in both Must-have warframes article, as well as Must-have warframe build-examples article, but to Re-cap and summarize:

Hydroid – boost resource drops to DOUBLE amount

Hydroid is good when farming to DOUBLE your resource drops IF his 4th ability (tentacle swarm) is the ONLY thing killing the enemies – assuming that the Hydroid have equipped Pilfering Swarm mod (which is what gives his 4th ability the double resource drops).

Nekros – desecrate enemy corpses for +54% chance of additional drops

Nekros is great for farming for a similar purpose, at level 30 his 2nd (now passive) ability can be toggled on to desecrate enemy corpses in the nekros vicinity (affected by Ability range) where each desecration of a corpse results in a +54% chance of additional drops. Might be good idea for the Nekros to equip some Ability efficiency mods as well as perhaps Health conversion if he can afford it (a Cephalon Simaris mod) as well as Despoil mod, see proper mod-setups for useful warframes for more information about this.

With Pilfering Swarm Hydroid and a level 30 Nekros, this gives +154% additional drops, which is very useful and makes a huge difference.

Then we come to sustainability, for the “Pilfdroid” especially, his 4th ability when charged for additional tentacles and power, it consumes large amounts of energy, and a Pilfdroid modded for strength and efficiency might not have enough mod slots for enlarged energy pool, which makes it either very expensive (team energy restores) for a Pilfdroid to sustain all of those Tentacle swarms, or makes him dependent on energy replenishments from other sources – this is where a Trinity comes in.

Trinity – sustain everybody’s energy and improve survivability

Trinity is a very popular warframe for farming, because it is THE support of Warframe, she can replenish health and shields with her 4th ability instantly to improve survivability, as well as sustain energy and health with her 1st and 2nd abilities – it is her 2nd ability, Energy Vampire, we will be interested in when a trinity is in a farming group. Energy Vampire works in the way that Trinity targets an enemy by aiming and pressing her 2nd ability, that energy then becomes a Well of Energy that pulsates energy outwards from that enemy and all team members in range gets a replenishing energy pulse of an amount which is affected by Ability strength (pulse range is affected by Ability range). And for an effective Trinity (also known as EV in farming because of “Energy vampire”) you want negative Ability duration to reduce the amount of time inbetween energy pulses – so that the energy replenishes your team mates as quickly as possible :)

Nova – speed enemies up, receive more loot drops as a result

And Last but not least – Nova, I chose to type Nova within parentheses because it is a “convenient” option when farming, but not a very Vital one, if you cannot find a Nova – all that happens is you might be farming a bit “slower”, since Nova in farming is used to speed enemies up to increase the amount of enemies spawned – and thereby increase the amount of loot dropped.

Rhino as alternative to Speed Nova

I recently discovered the value of a Buffer rhino to bring along when farming Argon crystals for example in the void to boost my Tentacle swarm on my pilfdroid, allowed us to stay until 40min on Ani survival (base level 20-25) and got 13 argon crystals from it! :D

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Warframes to get and how to mod them

In Warframe most warframes you can get fill different purposes in the game, as you could see above we pointed our four warframes especially useful when farming. But there are a few other warframes as well that will help you with completing missions easier than it otherwise would be. These are as follows: Volt, Loki, Frost and Rhino.

All of the warframes we think you should focus on getting first – are listed in our Must-have warframes article, and for “proper” build examples that will maximize those warframes for you, check out our Must-have warframe build-examples article. But to Re-cap real quick:

Volt – speed yourself and your allies up significantly in missions

Volt is a Great warframe to help you rush through missions thanks to his 2nd ability, with Ability Strength and Ability duration equipped, this ability will speed yourself and your allies up significant amounts and last for long periods of time, allowing you to rush through Capture missions insanely quick, as well as Boss farming for additional warframes, etc. Definitely a warframe worth getting to ease the effort of certain missions.

Loki – longest stealth duration with normal speed in the game

Loki is Great for all manner of stealth missions, or survivability missions because of his 2nd ability, which makes him invisible. Personally my own Loki’s stealth lasts about 27-30 seconds, which is quite a long time considering during this time I can move around and about in regular as well as sprinting speeds, which compared to for example Ivara who can only “sneak” in reduced movement speed while stealthed indefinitely – I think I prefer the Loki speed during stealth, even if I have to refresh my speed every half minute or so :P

Frost – snow globes to block incoming projectiles and slow down enemies

Frost is Great for Defense, Mobile Defense and excavation or similar mission types where something needs to be protected, because Frost can summon Snow Globes that block ALL incoming projectiles for a certain amount of damage – his Snow Globes can also be Massively enhanced by doing a certain technique which can make Snow Globes reach a total resistance of up to 1 million damage.

In general Frost is a really fun and badass warframe well worth getting – A lot of useful AoE and powerful offensive abilities parallell with his Snow Globe ability.

Rhino – Buff allies damage done by A Lot

Rhino is a useful warframe to get if you ever want to try EXP farming easily, basically what you do is you mod him for strength and duration, then go to Berehynia as buffer – preferably after having read our EXP farming guide so you know what to do and bring with you lots of unranked or low-ranked weapons you wish to Max rank fast.

 

Most of these warframes are fairly easy to farm, and if you find it hard to farm them yourself, try asking in Recruit chat, there might be someone else looking to farm them :)

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Earn Platinum easy and FOR Free in Warframe

Earning platinum in-game is something I think most players want to – and Need to learn, it is quite simple actually, its based on trading with other players.

For this, we have written a few articles that might be helpful and useful to you:

• What to use Platinum on/for and why – give new players advice on how to best spend their platinum
• Trading Rules and How to trade – Help new players understand how trading is done in Warframe
• Guide to Warframe.market – Helps new players get started with THE best trading platform for Warframe
• Void Trader & Ducats – Introduces players to the Void trader and also advice on how he can help you earn platinum easy

These 4 articles contain most- if not all you need to know to earn platinum purely by playing this game :) Enjoy!

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Strong, good, solid weapons for beginners in Warframe

For this I can only offer my personal opinion, which probably varies quite a bit from many other players, but I have found during my time playing this game, a few weapons that for me at least, stood out in the crowd. Mind you, these weapons recommended here are mostly aimed at players just starting out.

For Primary I would recommend Boltor (MR 2 requirement) since a majority of enemies you will be facing in this game is consistent of Grineer, also Hek (MR 4 requirement) for a solid and long-range viable shotgun with Massive overall damage, Ignis (MR 4 requirement) if you can get it and afford to Forma and mod it “properly” – if so, this weapon will completely incinerate ALL infested and flesh unit enemies, also Soma (MR 6 required) for a Great massive magazine size rapid fire rifle with high crit-chance.

For Secondary I would recommend Akbolto (MR 0 requirement) – again- Great starter weapon, a relative to Boltor and same type of damage (puncture) which makes it very effective vs. Grineer – even if it may take you some time to craft these dual-wielded pistols – I think they are worth it ;) Hikou (MR 2 requirement) is another secondary I would recommend, super-fast throwing stars with good damage and quick reload-time. Atomos (MR 4 requirement) is my personal favorite that I, myself, use constantly in most missions – it’s very similar to the Primary beam-rifle Ignis with the exception that this beam-weapons beam “bounces” inbetween enemies, which means you can aim at 1 enemy and assuming your have enough range (can be improved with Ruinous extension mod) you can bounce the beam off of that one enemy to reach the entire room easily :D And last but not least – Stug (MR 2 requirement) is a very fun Corrosive-based weapon that will end up melting all your enemies into a puddle of goo xD Try it out to see what you think :P

For Melee I always recommend first and foremost – the Galatine! (MR 3 requirement) – it’s a slower attack-speed Heavy sword but does some nice damage and has great Stance mod combos (Cleaving whirlwind and Tempo Royale best ones I think). Nikana (MR 4 requirement) is another good solid sword for those of you who prefer faster and lighter swords – its very good to mod for crit as well.

All of these can be found and read more about in our article Must-have weapons in Warframe. And for mod-setups and builds to go with them – as well as some general modding tips and pointers, check out our Must-have weapon build examples and mod-setups in Warframe article.

Even though I recommend these weapons – remember to get as many weapons you can to level from 0-30 for the mastery rank! Delete them if you didn’t like them ;) But getting many/all weapons testing them out and leveling them from 0-30 also allows you to find a playstyle and the weapons that you like! :)

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Syndicates in Warframe – what they are and how to get started

Next up we will talk a little about Syndicates in Warframe. As soon as you get to Mastery Rank 3 you can start earning points with syndicates, doing this will open up access to rewards in form of so called “augmentation mods” such as Pilfering Swarm for Hydroid which Doubled loot drops, and many others for various warframes. You can also get new archwing weapons, and so called “syndicate weapons” which are Improved versions of regular weapons – such as Telos Boltor or Telos Akbolto which are syndicate versions of the regular Boltor and Akbolto – they usually come with very useful and strong “additional features” such as AoE damage of various elemental damage types etc.

We have previously written a very exhaustingly extensive guide to Syndicates, if you have some time over, and are interested in learning more, read through it to get help and advice with how to get started and which syndicates you should choose to earn points with to get what you want/need :)

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EXP farming in Warframe to level equipment Fast

We wrote an extensive guide earlier for how to EXP farm in warframe at Berehynia on Sedna, now new players might have a hard time doing this at first, but joining farming groups or just going a survival missions with your weapons might be a viable substitute until you reach the level at which you can join Berehynia for the fastest possible EXP farming in Warframe (don’t forget to mod your stuff even if rank 0 to help get through the survival).

The key usually is in the modding, if you have a weapon you are sure you wish to keep, that you like, upgrade it with an Orokin catalyst (if you have one) to get some additional mod capacity when the weapon is still low-rank, then check what low-level survival you wish to do for EXP farm – I personally used to go Apollo on Mercury and stay there quite a while – on that mission node for example, you face off against Grineer enemies, which means mod for Blast/Corrosive, or Radiation/Viral whichever elemental combo you prefer, and equip a stance mod to your melee weapon to increase mod capacity further as well as get access to useful melee attacks to help your efforts battling through until you have leveled your weapons quite a bit.

Joining “regular” farming groups such as Polymer Bundle farm at Ophelia, Uranus if you have access to Archwing and have one of the 4 farming warframes – could also be an alaternative and very useful way of getting Tons of Exp :)

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Quick intro to modding and how to think when modding

Alright so modding will be one of the most important things you can learn in this game to improve and strengthen your gear enough so you can handle the resistance you will be facing which gradually will get harder and harder as you progress through this game. So some basic understanding of how this works could be very helpful :)

Mod basics

Lets start off with a very Basic introduction to what a Mod is:

So now that we know what a mod is, and what the different parts of a mod are, lets move on to how we can upgrade the rank of a mod.

Upgrade mod rank (fusion)

So when you are in your landing craft, you go to your “mod segment” and check it out, it will show you similar to the picture above. Once there you find a mod you wish to rank-up, select it (if you have multiples of it, you first have to select 1 of those multiples), then you press “fusion” in top-left corner which will light up, after that you will get to the following interface:

And as you can see in that picture, we have pointed out where you can see your owned Endo available, as well as where you can see upgrade-changes for ranking up the mod, as well as the mod-capacity the upgrade will drain once mod is equipped. You can also see how much Endo and Credits it will cost you to reach the specified upgrade for a certain mod on the right-side of the interface.

Max Rank of mod Not necessary Nor super important

While Max-ranking a mod will give you max of what it can give you in terms of upgrade, its often VERY costly to do this, both in Endo AND credits. Also, it will increase mod-capacity drain by tons – and on “regular” weapons and warframes you might have that are not yet Formad, you might want to keep some of the mods “less than” Max-rank, to be able to equip your upgraded mods to non-formad weapons as well, without having to buy duplicates of the mods only for this purpose, or upgrade another of the same mod to a lower-rank just to fit a non-formad weapon, or go on a tedious mod-farm to get another duplicate for the same purpose..

I am MR20, and can’t be bothered to farm both Formas as well as re-rank up all warframes and weapons I have that I like to play just so that I can MAX ALL of my mods – I simply don’t need it to perform in the game – and I still do pretty well since I can do most things without any help :) I also do not like the idea of having to farm millions of credits (tedious af imo) just so that I can upgrade my mods (and I have a lot of them as well which would make it even more resources required). Same goes for Endo, there is only so much Endo one can farm in a day, and it still takes quite a while to farm it and the Ayatan Sculpture missions are Weekly* which means that won’t give a lot of Endo fast enough – call me impatient but this is things that you can focus on doing once you are MAX-level or basically have everything and nothing else to do, but still feel like playing the game – then you can do these things :P

Match mod polarities for stronger and better modding

All mods basically have polarities which could be seen in the top-right hand corner of the mod basics picture above, on that specific picture we had a mod with a “Minus polarity” (-) which means, whenever you equip this type of mod to a mod-slot with the same polarity, the mod-capacity will be more or less halved (rounded up – so if you have 13 mod-cost on a mod, it will become 7) – you might see now why this is very helpful and useful when modding :) Helps you fit all those awesome mods you want to equip by equipping them in certain slots, OR forma the warframe/weapon to manipulate the available mod slot polarities :)

As you can see in the picture we have marked the effect of another “Minus polarity” (-) mod, equipped to a Minus polarity mod-slot and the effect it has – my Maxed constitution mod normally would have cost me 13 mod-capacity! (That particular build is for my Loki for anyone curious :P)

Forma Equipment to fit all mods with the ranks you want for various mod-setups and builds

Using Formas are explained in our How to forma article in more detail. Basically what you do is add a Forma to your piece of equipment (weapon or warframe for example) and get the ability to alter the polarity of any chosen slot – even the Aura mod-slot (which increases the general capacity a specific warframe can have). And since you have seen what matching polarities can do, this opens up the possibility for you to customize a warframe/weapon or whatever piece of equipment to whatever type of build and mod-setup you want!

Legendary Fusion cores – what they are, what they do and how to get

So, you might have run into the term “Legendary fusion cores” coupled with MASSIVE prices in trade chat or the like, you can get Legendary Fusion cores as a reward from high-level daily Sortie missions.

Legendary Fusion cores instantly MAXES a mod of your choosing – personally I have never got any, so can’t tell for sure how it works but I believe this is it’s purpose anyways. So now you know why the pricetag of them might be a bit spicy :P

Primed mods – what they are, what they do and how to get

So Primed mods are just like primed equipment really- Improved versions of the regular mod. In the case of primed mods, they offer a higher total increase and more ranks that can be upgraded to. You can get primed mods from either Void Trader, or from buying them from other players on warframe.market for example. Remember! Buying primed mods from other players REQUIRES 1 million credits from you as the buyer to trade them! Many people seem to not know this or forget it, remember it to save you and other traders time!

Augmentation mods

Augmentation mods “unlock” additional effects for specific weapons or warframe abilities. For example Frost has an Augmentation mod called Freeze force that make Frosts 1st ability Buff other allies damage with +% cold damage for a duration of time once targeted with Frosts 1st ability and the weapon Hek has an augmentation syndicate mod that gives it Massive increase of multishot as well as adds the syndicate weapon effect to a regular Hek shotgun for 1000 damage AoE every 1000 affinity the regular Hek with the augmentation mod equipped receives in missions.

Exilus Mods for Warframes and unlocking with Exilus adapter

Exilus mods I like to think of as “detail” mods that give a little “extra” improvement to warframes that you have to work a little to unlock – since the mod-slot is locked until you equip a so called Exilus adapter to the warframe you would like to unlock Exilus mod-slot for.

Exilus mods can be equipped to regular mod slots usually but not the other way around – regular mods cannot! be equipped to Exilus mod slots. Rush is an example of an Exilus mod slot that increase Running speed (very nice on Loki for example to move quicker through stealth missions).

Damaged mods and why to avoid these

I honestly have no idea what the real purpose of Damaged mods are – they have reduced ranks and reduced improvements compared to the regular mods, and since regular mods are so easy to get I don’t even consider them useful for new players honestly. Avoid equipped and upgrading Damaged mods, simply sell them or turn them into Endo to upgrade regular mods. And if you don’t yet have regular mods, be a bit patient, they will come, in tons xD Trust me on this :P

Aura mods for Warframes and Stance mods for Melee Weapons that match polarity increases general mod-capacity

So you might know this, you might not, but Aura mods that Match polarities will increase the total mod-capacity of that warframe same way Stance mods does for Melee weapons :D!

If you would like to have for example Corrosive Projection (Minus polarity mod) for a warframe that doesn’t have a Minus polarity aura mod-slot, simply Forma the warframe to change it to your liking :D

Riven mods – what they are, what they do and how to get

So since I’m personally not very into the whole Riven mod business I will only give you a brief introduction. Basically Riven mods are special mods that can be granted as a reward from completing high-level Sortie missions or traded with other players and they can be a bit of a lottery since once you get a Riven mod – it is for a specific piece of equipment (primary/secondary/warframe, etc.) and they are “veiled” which means you have to do a mission to unlock the riven mod. You do these missions by reading what needs to be done on the riven mod, then equip the riven mod to said piece of equipment you got the riven mod for (warframe, weapon etc.) then go into mission and complete the task, once done, the mod will be unlocked and it will be randomized into either a very favorable mod with 3 different increase features (+damage, +status chance, +crit chance for example) for a popular already strong weapon or it is randomized into a not so great mod for a very unpopular weapon – however sometimes it surprises and is the difference between a weapon being considered not great to start with, to becoming insanely good when the riven mod is equipped (hence the massive platinum prices of some riven mods – they might end up doubling a weapons damage some times or even more).

Basic concept of modding – improve already strong base values

So a fundamental of modding in Warframe is to enhance/improve base values that are already strong before any mods have been added. This will give the most gain in improvement since the mods usually improve stats based off percentages (%), which means equipping a +50% Armor-improvement mod to Loki with a daunting low base-armor of 65 at rank 30, would give us 97 (50% of 65 = 32.5, 32.5+65 = 97.5 – rounded down to 97). While compared to a warframe with say 300 base armor, this would give us 450 armor instead with the same armor increase (+50%). So low base-value gave us about +32.5 while same increase with higher base-value gave us +150, thats almost 5 times as much! Simple math folks :) Very useful to remember this when modding!

This concept however solid, doesn’t affect all modding scenarios, sometimes you wish to add elemental damage or whatnot to a weapon that doesn’t have base elemental damage for example, then this rule don’t matter as you probably can imagine :)

Elemental modding to adapt weapons to enemy factions

So we already discussed this quite at length in our DMG System 2.0 article, but to re-cap real quick, basically what you want to do is to adapt your elemental modding to the specific faction you are fighting in specific missions. Now you might think this will be seriously tedious to change inbetween every single mission – fear not, this is where your Mod-setup configurations (see above) comes in :)

So what Elemental damage types are effective against what and how to achieve the so called Elemental combos?

Well, first off, again – check out DMG System 2.0 for the what is effective against what, but basically Infested and flesh units are very weak against (slash and) Fire, Shields very weak against (impact and) Cold, Grineer very weak against (puncture and) Corrosive (since it weakens armor). Below we also list recommended elemental combos for specific enemies:

Try Blast + corrosive vs. infested to seriously melt them – try this with an Ignis for max effect ;P or Atomos secondary with a ruinous extension – you won’t be disappointed.

Try Radiation + viral OR blast + corrosive vs. Grineer – very debated on forums, but I think it comes down to personal preference and playstyle.

Try Gas + Magnetic vs. Corpus since Magnetic reduces shields and Gas basically is AoE dmg that can bypass shields.

So to re-cap how to achieve elemental combo modding – place for example Heat and Toxin mods next to each other from top-left going right on the first mod-setup row, and then from bottom-left to right on bottom row in mod-setup to achieve the Elemental combo damage type: Gas.

Use pre-programmable Mod-setup configurations to make playing easier and more efficient

You might already have read through our Configuration and Loadouts article, if you haven’t check it out! It features information of how you make the most of both these in-game features, and they are very useful to make gameplay more efficient. The mod-setup configurations I’m referring to in this section helps you setup up to 3 different mod-setups PER warframe/weapon. This allows you to make different builds without erasing a previous build, it also allows you to quick-switch between various builds when about to enter missions – VERY helpful! :)

General Tips n tricks for new players

A general advice for new players is also to get a Sentinel as a companion and equip Vacuum mod so that it can help pick up loot for you in missions :)

Don’t understimate the power of “Public groups” when doing missions, it is often Much quicker (and easier) than doing missions by your lonesome!

Also find a higher-ranked friend that can help out is often golden, and higher ranked players can be bored quite a lot and love to help new players because its more fun than hard grinding at times (I know I do ;P)

Join a clan – doesn’t have to be an active one but at least join one with a decent Dojo (clan rank determines amount of research done for dojo – our clan have rank 9 for example and we have almost all research done (except Hema and a few other minor items – something to look for when joining a clan)) so you can gain access to Volt, other warframes, archwings and a lot of good weapons that can only be obtained from dojos. Also Shadow clans that are one of the smaller clans with a max amount of 30 members, means that researching items in those clans are cheaper compared to for a Storm clan with a max amount of 100 players, etc. So if you are about to join a clan, check clan rank, and also ask what type of clan it is, table of different clan types and member amounts can be seen below:

Clan type:	Member capacity
Ghost	10
Shadow	30
Storm	100
Mountain	300
Moon	1000

To help show the contrast between a low-capacity clan vs. a high-capacity clan, check this out: a Shadow clan is required to pay 30k credits to fund a research project of base cost 10k credits. Whilst a Moon tier clan is required to pay 50k Circuits for a research project with a base cost of 500 circuits. So a moon clan have 100x more expensive to complete new research than a Ghost clan, while Shadow clan is 3x more expensive :) This scaling reflects member amounts as you can see, since ghost clan is 10 members, and Moon is 1000 a moon clan is 100x larger in capacity.

If you are in need of quick credits and have a hard time or lack access to The Index which seem to be the popular choice nowadays – go to a Dark Sector survival – list of available nodes and their respective 5min reward of credits can be found in the Right sidebar on this website – choose one with a high credit reward after completing 5min in the mission node, and go there with Heat+corrosive modded weapons – preferably Ignis if you have it to melt the infested, and extract at 5, to get a quick 20-28k credits easily.

For easy platinum in lack of Prime part blueprints to sell – don’t underestimate the power of selling “regular” mods that might be useful to other people – but keep it to regular mods with an estimated value on warframe.market of 3plat or higher, less is not worth neither the time nor the effort it takes to put up the ads for them and trade them. Also keep in mind you have a daily restriction of available trades per day – use them wisely :)