Warframe allows you to become an agile space ninja, decimating foes with varied abilities, buffing allies with life-saving effects, and traveling across massive landscapes filled with exuberant endemic life. But first you must have the means to do so by crafting rad weapons and powerful Warframes. As such, you’ll need to farm resources to get the specific equipment you want. Among the “odd” materials like Tellurium or Argon Crystals, Oxium is one of the toughest to farm. And you’ll need a whole lot with a number of items that require vast amounts of it. In this guide, we’ll point you to the best ways of farming Oxium.
How Do You Get Oxium?
Oxium can be acquired from daily login rewards and completing bounties. If you really want a lot, though, it must be farmed from specific enemy types.
Daily login rewards are pretty hit or miss due to their randomness. Increasing your Mastery Rank can help, though. The number of resources and the chance of rarer rewards for login bonuses (a.k.a. the Daily Tribute) go up with each subsequent rank.
Completing low level bounties on Cetus or Fortuna (the Earth and Venus open worlds) can earn you 100 or 200 Oxium, as well, but the daily bounty rewards are also drawn from a random pool. You can easily complete a few bounties in a row and walk away with exactly zero Oxium. Not to mention each bounty takes far too much time. Even if you have the K-Drive or Archwing Launcher available to you, it’s a long process for a slim chance at Oxium. Failing bounties, which can occasionally happen due to glitches or confusion, will also leave you redoing the entire process. It’s not worth the risk of frustration!
Another rare way to get Oxium is simply from storage containers. These boxes of goodies are found on almost every mission. Many of them have a slim chance of dropping Oxium, as well. As such it’s a good idea to break them as much as possible when playing through content normally. Besides the Oxium, storage containers can also drop rare items such as Orokin Cells, depending on the location. It never hurts to check what’s inside!
The best way to earn Oxium is from killing Corpus enemies — specifically the Oxium Osprey. They are the quickest and easiest source of that oh-so-precious Oxium that every Warframe player desires. While there are other ways to farm Oxium, these uncommon Ospreys have a 100 percent guaranteed drop chance.
Where Should You Farm Oxium in Warframe?
There are three Defense missions that spawn Oxium Ospreys in each wave:
- Gulliver on Phobos.
- Io on Jupiter.
- Outer Terminus on Pluto.
Each of these missions feature Corpus foes and require the player to defend a Warframe Cryopod from wave after wave of foes.
Gulliver on Phobos has an egregious gimmick where the Warframe Cryopod periodically raises and lowers. That makes effectively protecting it a more grueling process than it needs to be. The lower level makes it easier for enemies to duck and hide from you with the sheer number of obstructions littered around. While this doesn’t necessarily make the mission harder, it can make waves take longer, which we want to avoid.
Outer Terminus on Pluto has a large, open level as well as numerous stairs and ziplines for enemies to use. Not only is it harder to kill enemies here, but the Cryopod is in an enclosed space, making some AoE abilities less effective.
Io places the Cryopod in the middle of a large enough space to place down your AoE abilities with enemies who tend to attack the Cryopod head on. Every five waves completed will reward you with a mod or a Void Relic, too These bonus rewards are a great way to progress other important elements of the games while you farm Oxium — even if you end up transmuting the mods or burning the prize inside your Void Relic for Ducats.
Which of these three is the best to grind? Out of them all, Io is the only one where you can also receive Relics or mods on five-wave intervals. This is no doubt where you want to farm Oxium in Warframe.
How To Kill an Oxium Osprey
Oxium Ospreys are unique foes. They hover around and attack from far away while hiding in groups of other Corpus enemies. They fire small electric bolts and dodge your attacks. Most crucially they can and will self-destruct.
If an Osprey self-destructs you will not receive any Oxium whatsoever. You want to stay at a safe distance while killing them. The only time an Oxium Osprey triggers itself own explosion is after a forward charge attack at your Warframe or an ally. If they make contact with your body, they go boom. If they miss, however, you’re clear to keep shooting! While you can try to melee them, make sure you can get the kill in one hit. Otherwise they will try to self-destruct again given the opportunity.
Luckily, they’re fairly easy to kill. Enemies on Io in particular are only around level 20. Any decent weapon or Warframe should be able to take them down without worrying about the self-destruct too much. Blast weapons are great, too, as you can take care of multiple enemies in a short span of time. I myself use a Proboscis Cernos to shoot in the vicinity of any enemies I see on the mini-map. The shot pulls in enemies to one spot, making them take damage over time, and explodes in a wide radius after a few seconds.
Since this is a Defense mission, you must eliminate all enemies throughout each wave to progress. If it starts to get too tough as you progress, be sure to extract at one of the five-wave intervals. Failure means losing all your resources. That includes the Oxium you farmed.
Ways to Make Oxium Farming Easier
Oxium Farming Companions
Having a Companion definitely makes grabbing resources smoother. Your A.I. buddy can scoop them up with certain mods.
- Vacuum – Collects items in the vicinity and makes it easier to snag Oxium; especially since it can get glitched or stuck inside walls. It also helps you collect everything else in the area.
- Animal Instinct – Displays enemies in proximity on the minimap, helping ensure you don’t miss any Oxium Osprey.
- Charm – Can be equipped to Smeeta Kavat, multiplying Oxium drops.
Oxium Farming Mods
- Enemy Radar – An Aura you can equip to your Warframe which adds enemies in close proximity to the minimap.
- Loot Detector – An equitable Aura for your Warframe which highlights loot crates on your minimap and more notably any Oxium you may have yet to pick up.
Oxium Farming Tips
Both Enemy Radar and Loot Detector mods can be equipped to any Warframe so long as you don’t mind giving up another Aura mod for the mission. Since Io is a pretty reasonably easy area, you shouldn’t need to worry too much.
There are some specific mods such as Pilfering Swarm for the Hydroid Warframe which increase the chance of doubling Oxium if Hydroid’s tentacles destroy the Oxium Osprey.
Nekros can cast Desecrate in an area giving enemies a chance at dropping extra Oxium.
Ivara can cast Prowl on enemies to increase the likelihood to leave behind additional Oxium, as well. This is a slow process, however, and not terribly recommended.
If you do have these Warframes be sure to use them as you farm Oxium, but if you don’t, any Warframe can still be used for Oxium farming. When you do have the time it is always beneficial to eventually build each of these as they make farming for particular materials much, much easier.
