You never know what Warframe tips might end up saving your shiny, wet behind. The action-driven loot game is constantly evolving, adding new stuff, and stripping away old junk! That’s why we’ve put together this handy list of Warframe tips — specifically designed for new players to jump into this incredibly dense, evolving game. Need to know the best way to move around? How about the primary means of powering up your weapons? Learn about all that and more in our Warframe tips guide!
This Warframe guide was written collaboratively by Managing Editor Steven Strom and Podcast Managing Editor merritt k.
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1. Learn to Bullet Jump
Warframe is all about movement, and the quintessential move of the Tenno is the bullet jump. It launches you forward much more quickly than sprinting, and can be chained indefinitely. To perform a bullet jump, crouch while moving to slide, then while still crouching, press the jump key. It takes some getting used to, but you can make things easier by remapping the crouch key. Since you’ll be hitting it a lot, try mapping it to a side mouse button. If you need a demonstration, we have a full Warframe bullet jump guide right here (complete with a handy gif).
2. Use Combos Efficiently
As you perform melee attacks in Warframe, you’ll notice a little number in the bottom right corner of the screen going up. Once this number hits certain thresholds, multipliers will start appearing next to it. This multiplier does not apply to all of your attacks. Instead, it’s a bonus to damage that will apply to your next heavy attack, spending your entire combo counter in the process. The idea is to build up a big combo, then use a heavy attack to tear apart a tough enemy. Mods can increase your “combo efficiency,” which means that you’ll retain some of your counter even after performing a heavy attack.
3. Pause the Game in Solo Mode
Warframe allows you to set your party to public, friends, invite only, and solo. In solo mode, you can actually pause the game by entering the menu, since there’s nobody else in your session to inconvenience by doing so.
4. Skip the Open Worlds and Come Back Later
When you’re just starting out in Warframe, you might be drawn to the open-world area on Earth called the Plains of Eidolon. But this content was actually added later in the game’s development, and isn’t meant to be tackled by new players. Feel free to check out the Cetus market and maybe do the Saya’s Vigil quest, but don’t worry about exploring the Plains of Eidolon (particularly at night) for now. Later on, you’ll be much better equipped to handle the area’s threats. You’ll also have quicker ways of covering its vast distances. One of these can be found at Fortuna on Venus, which leads to the second open-world zone in Warframe.
5. Understand Mods
Mods are the main driver of advancement in Warframe. You can level up frames and weapons to a max of 30, at which point your only means to increase their capabilities is via mods. Each frame, weapon, and companion has a number of mod slots and “capacity.” The former determines how many mods you can install while the latter value limits their collective strength — based on their total “drain.” The basic loop is to get more mods, dissolve duplicates into Endo, use Endo to upgrade a copy of each mod, and upgrade your gear to hold more and stronger mods all at once.
When you start out, you can just click on “Actions” in the upgrade screen for a piece of equipment to have the game automatically assign mods to it. Mods are reusable and do not have to be removed from one weapon to be installed in another! Though some important ones to upgrade first include: Vitality, Serration, Point Blank, Pressure Point, and Hornet Strike. Basically anything that makes you harder to kill and deal more damage.
6. Void Relics Contain Delicious Treats
You’ll start accumulating objects called Void Relics as you play Warframe. Each relic has a set of items that may be contained within it, typically components for powerful Prime gear. To open a relic, you have to enter a special variant of a mission called a Void Fissure. You find these missions under the little flame icon in the top right corner of the star chart. There you’re tasked with completing a normal mission type while also collecting 10 Void Traces (little white flame icons) before the end.
When you extract, you’ll automatically open your relic and receive a random item from its loot pool. But on the screen that shows you that information, you can also choose a reward from any other player instead. Which makes fissures best experienced in multiplayer. If someone goes with your drop, meanwhile, you’ll get bonus Void Traces. You can use up to 100 of these to upgrade relics and give them better odds to drop their rarest items.
7. Elemental Types Matter
There are four primary elemental damage types in Warframe (Cold, Heat, Toxin, and Electricity) and six secondary types created by combining primary ones (Blast, Corrosive, Gas, Magnetic, Radiation, and Viral). Different Warframes and weapons inflict different kinds of damage; some are more effective against certain enemies than others. For instance, Magnetic damage is only effective against shields — and thus typically against the Corpus. It’ll do considerably less damage against Grineer armor, by contrast.
Each damage type also has an associated status effect, which has a chance to apply to an enemy determined by the weapon’s Status Chance. You don’t need to worry about this too much when you start, but it’s worth packing multiple damage types between your primary, secondary, and melee weapons to try and cover all of your bases. Later on, you’ll want to mod weapons to deal specific types of damage to make certain enemies easier.
8. Watch for Your Daily First Win Bonus
Every 24 hours in Warframe, you get a login bonus called the “Daily Tribute.” This is pretty obvious. A friendly NPC will appear onscreen to give you something for free, or a choice of three options. It’s less obvious, but this also signals your “Daily First Win Bonus” is available. This hidden benefit doubles the number of Credits (the game’s primary resource) you receive from the first mission you play per day. So it’s best to make your first mission a good one. Dark Sector missions, which provide bonus resources and are marked on your Star Map with the Warframe logo, are a good place to start. The Profit-Taker boss on Venus is also a tremendous source of income. Though it’s a very late-game enemy. It might not seem like a big deal at first, but Credits quickly become one of the biggest bottlenecks on progress late in the game, as upgrading just one mod to max takes a sizable sum.
9. Start Crafting Forma
Forma is a unique resource in Warframe. It’s a crafting material used to make several weapons, sure, but it’s so much more than that. The golden puzzle pieces also let you “polarize” your gear. This adds custom symbols to your mod slots. When you match the symbol of the mod and the slot it’s placed in, that mod costs 50 percent fewer points (called “capacity” in-game). Combined with mods themselves, polarizing slots with Forma is one of the ultimate ways to upgrade your frames and weapons. That means you want a lot of it. Forma blueprints are mostly acquired from Relics, like Prime components, and take 24 hours to craft. So it’s a good idea to start making it sooner rather than later — building up a surplus of Forma for when you reach the endgame.
10. First Off, Follow the Junctions
Warframe doesn’t give a lot of direction to new players. Even its actual roadmap, the planetary Junctions, don’t call a lot of attention to themselves. But you absolutely want to focus on these when you’re just starting. Check out the Junctions — denoted by the white or blue diamond-shaped nodes on each planet — and follow their objectives. You’ll keep unlocking more as you jump from planet to planet. This will introduce you to the game’s many different systems and activities one-by-one. And if you’re ever not sure about something, you can look up the specific thing each Junction is trying to teach you with its challenges, which gives an order to your learning curve.
11. The Warframe Wiki Has the Numbers
The Warframe wiki doesn’t offer much direction, guidance, or subjective advice. What it does have is raw, uncut math. The site is full of super useful numbers: drop rates, elemental weaknesses, and detailed (if complicated) info on Warframe abilities. You kind of need to already know what you’re looking for when using the site, but it’s a great resource if you do. Just… maybe avoid the comments section. It’s not the friendliest place.
12. Railjack is Worth It
Railjack missions were a pain when they first appeared. The spaceship-on-spaceship combat mode was repetitive, ate up resources, offered few rewards, and required a massive grind just to build your own vessel (the titular Railjack). It’s a lot better now. Railjack missions provide tons of bonus rewards to incentivize players to join: including tons of credits and Endo. It takes new players a while to reach this Railjack stuff, but it’s well worth it once you get there.
13. Don’t Forget Your Dailies
Surprise, surprise. Warframe has a bunch of time-limited content it doesn’t do the best job of explaining. But it’s not too complicated if you’ve played other, similar “live games” like this one. It all breaks down into content that refreshes daily, weekly, or on an irregular schedule. In this case, dailies mostly refer to standing (a reputation resource you get from open-world factions and Syndicates found in social spaces) and sorties (randomized three-part missions).
You use standing to purchase unique mods, items, blueprints, and weapons. Whereas sorties give you a random reward from a pool of drops. Luckily, you can track all of these from the comfort of your personal ship. Syndicate standing (and how much you have left to earn that day) is visible from the console to the left of your star map. Whereas sorties are accessible from the star map itself. Just click on the diamond-shaped symbol on the far-right of your mission icons when you sit down.
14. Maroo Has a Present for You
Besides your dailies, Warframe also has a couple quests that refresh every week. The most important of these is Maroo’s treasure hunt, which becomes available after the Stolen Dreams story quest. This entrepreneurial NPC will task you with heisting Ayatan Sculptures: basically pretty, wiggly vases. You can then turn these into decorations on your ship. More importantly, you can sell them back to Maroo for lots of Endo, the resource used to rank up mods. Combine them at your mod station with Ayatan Stars (blue and orange jewels that drop randomly during missions) first for an even bigger payout!
15. You Really Ought to Join a Clan
We get it. Playing with strangers can be intimidating. Maybe you won’t fit in, or they’ll give you a hard time for being new. Really, though, it’s practically mandatory in Warframe. Joining a clan (i.e. an in-game guild) gives you access to a Dojo. Dojos are social spaces customized by players that give access to things like labs and the dry dock. Each of these is necessary to unlock some of the most powerful weapons in the game, as well as several Warframes and Railjack content (i.e. spaceship battles). You can start your own solo clan, too! It’ll just take a ton of time and resources to fully construct. It’s easier to just join a newbie friendly group from the Recruitment channel of in-game chat and leech off someone else’s hard work. You can always quit later!
16. You Can Trade Premium Currency
A huge part of the Warframe endgame is finding rare mods, components, blueprints, and items — then trading them to other players. That’s mostly handled via Platinum. This is the game’s premium currency, purchased using real money. While players will sometimes trade gear one-to-one, people mostly want to make a little in-game cash from their long days of farming. You can find buyers and sellers via the Trading chat channel. But Warframe.market is a much better, slicker, and more consistent place to shop around.
17. Fish for the Big Discounts
Speaking of Platinum, very Warframe players buy it “raw.” There are many better value propositions than just dropping real cash on the premium currency out of hand. You can get massive discounts via Prime Access bundles, for instance, or wait for a coupon to be delivered directly to your account. Besides crafting materials, your Daily Tribute (a.k.a. login bonus) can include a 25, 50, or 75 percent discount code for Platinum. That 75 percent discount is what you really want (assuming you don’t load up via Prime Access). It’s the best value proposition on unadulterated Platinum in Warframe. Though it’s also very, very rare.
18. Build an Extractor Armada
Extractors are unique items in Warframe that passively generate resources for you. Simply build them, set them, and forget them as they pull crafting materials out of planets you’ve fully unlocked. The blueprints are available on the normal market, and you can reuse them as many times as you need! Distilling Extractors in particular has so-so chance of giving you a nice haul of rare resources — so build as many as you can run at a time. The payouts aren’t usually great, but they add up over days, and months, and years. We personally suggest always dropping one on Ceres and one on Saturn. These locations can drop Orokin Cells, which are used for a lot of endgame gear and can be a pain to collect.
19. Warframe Has its Own “Xur”
Maybe you’ve played Destiny before. Maybe you haven’t, but still know Xur — the weekly vendor that offers a rotating stock with every visit — anyway. Well, just know that Warframe has its own equivalent, randomized merchant. His name is Baro Ki’Teer, a.k.a. the Void Trader, and he has some tremendously useful items.
There are some differences between Xur and the Void Trader, however. First, Baro only appears every two weeks, contrasting against Xur’s weekly visits in Destiny 2. Second, the Warframe trader only appears in social spaces. These public zones are called “Tenno Relays.” You can find one on Mercury, Venus, Earth, Saturn, Europa, Eris, and Pluto. Although the Void Trader only appears at one Relay at a time. You’ll get a message in your inbox, specifying his location as soon as you log in during one of his active periods (which last 48 hours).
Baro Ki’Teer sells a lot of different things, and it’s mostly random from visit to visit. Sometimes his wares are primarily cosmetics. Other times, you can buy extremely useful mods that are only available in his shop (called Primed mods). Either way, though, you need a ton of credits (the basic Warframe currency) and Ducats. You get Ducats by selling Prime parts to Baro at one of the kiosks near his location on any Tenno Relay. He doesn’t even need to be present for you to sell them! Just consider carefully before you barter away your Prime parts.
20. Prime Parts Have Multiple Uses
Farming Prime parts is a time-honored tradition in Warframe. It’s an important mid-to-late-game activity that nets you more powerful versions of existing weapons and frames. You can build the Soma automatic rifle basically whenever you want, for example, but the Soma Prime — a superior version of the gun with better mod slots — requires you to farm its Prime parts, available from the aforementioned Void Relics.
There are many other uses for “useless” Prime parts in Warframe, too. You can sell duplicates for Ducats (the special currency Baro Ki’Teer covets). Meanwhile, certain Syndicates often request Prime parts as payment to level up your position with them. Not to mention you can trade Prime items to other Warframe players — usually for Platinum. Just post your wares in the Trade channel. Or check out Warframe.Market website. But whatever you do, don’t trash those parts!
21. There’s Rarely a Reason to Play Solo
Warframe is just plain meant to be played cooperatively. It’s not tremendously hard, in the early going, but playing with friends and strangers makes the experience a lot smoother — especially when you’re just starting out. Allies can revive you when you drop, kill enemies quicker, and help complete complex objectives you may not understand yet (like Spy missions). Try to play cooperatively as much as possible. A few story missions will eventually require you to go it alone, so you might as well learn while it’s safe.
22. Get a Rhino ASAP
While you’re working through the Junctions, you’ll quickly encounter the Jackal boss on Venus. This big bot isn’t too tough (even after the fight was recently reworked into something a bit more complex). But that’s not the only reason you want to fight it multiple times. Beginners should tackle the Jackal for its Rhino blueprints. This hefty Warframe can carry you through much of the game’s early content… and even some stuff beyond that. It’s also available pretty early in your journey, so get to work crafting it!
23. Pick Up Everything
One thing that sets Warframe apart from its competitors is crafting. While Destiny, The Division, and other loot games just drop stuff willy nilly, most of what you wield in Warframe must first be welded together at the Foundry on your ship. This, in turn, requires crafting resources. You can never have enough of anything.
That even goes for duplicate mods and blueprints! You can sell the latter from your inventory menu for Credits (which, as we’ve said, become important later on). Mods on the other hand should be melted down into Endo. While Maroo can provide you some of that good goo, your primary source will be from “dissolving” excess items at your mod station. Since upgrading mods is the primary way to level up in Warframe, you’re gonna need it.
