The world of Warframe modding can be intimidating to enter—it features some of the most complicated customization options out of any game. With hundreds of mods to choose from for each weapon, Warframe, companion, and archwing, it can be difficult to know where to start. Then there’s the fact that you can augment almost every aspect of your Warframes and guns, even going as far as tweaking how your Warframe will behave in-game. Not to fear, though! Our Warframe Mods Guide will help you start modding your equipment to unlock its full potential.
What Are Mods?
In many other games, leveling up a character or weapon makes that character or weapon more powerful; sometimes, you may get a chance to allocate skill or stat points, but the process is rarely more involved than that. This isn’t the case with Warframe.
In Warframe, your equipment becomes more powerful when you equip it with mods. Mods appear as cards that drop as loot from enemies and missions and can be equipped with Warframes, weapons, companions, and archwings to enhance their stats and grant them additional abilities. There are more than 800 mods to collect in the game, each of which can make your arsenal stronger and more diverse.
How to Equip Mods
You can equip mods via your arsenal by hovering over the equipment you want to mod and clicking the “Upgrade” option. You should then see your equipment’s mod slots and a list of equipable mods at the bottom of the screen. You can add a mod to your equipment by simply dragging and dropping a mod into the desired mod slot.
How to Acquire Mods
Most of the mods you acquire throughout the game will be enemy drops. Each enemy has a slight chance of dropping a mod from its drop table, with rarer enemies (such as event bosses and assassination targets) dropping rarer mods. Other mods are only obtainable through special missions, such as Alerts, Nightmare Mode, the Index, and Orokin Derelict vault runs. Spy missions, endless missions, Sabotage missions, and conclave matches also have a chance of awarding mods, along with other rewards such as Void Relics and resources.
You can also purchase other, more unique mods from Syndicates in exchange for standing or from Baro Ki’teer for ducats and credits. You can buy random mod packs from the Market if you have Platinum to burn. That said, if you’re willing to shell out Plat, you may as well purchase the mod you need directly from another player rather than roll the dice for a random assortment of mods. And finally, there are Riven mods, which can be acquired as random rewards from daily Sorties.
What Are Riven Mods?
Riven mods are unique mods that you can only equip with a single, specific weapon. Riven mods are almost exclusively obtainable via Sorties and can offer extremely powerful bonuses to weapons, sometimes at the cost of another stat. You cannot install more than one Riven mod per weapon; each even comes with its minimum Mastery Rank.
What’s the strangest about Riven mods is that they need to be “revealed” before you can use them. When you first acquire a Riven mod, it will confer no bonuses; you won’t even know what it does at first.
To find out, you must equip it to the appropriate weapon type and complete the challenge listed in the mod description. These challenges can be as simple as killing a certain number of enemies on a mission or as complex as synthesizing a Simaris target without traps or abilities while having a Hobbled Dragon Key equipped. Once you’ve completed the challenge, the mod’s specific weapon and bonuses will become apparent, and you’ll be able to equip it—assuming you have the required Mastery Rank and mod capacity for it, of course.
How to Upgrade Mods to Make Them More Powerful
When you first acquire a mod, it won’t be very powerful. To make a mod a truly deadly addition to your equipment, you’ll need to strengthen it through Fusion. Fusion is a process that consumes Endo to increase a mod’s rank, improving its effectiveness and its mod drain.
To initiate Fusion, enter your Orbiter and open your Mods segment. Then, select the mod you want to fuse and click the “Fusion” option. You should see two arrows beneath your mod that allow you to increase its rank, with each subsequent rank costing more Endo and credits. Once you’ve used these arrows to select your desired mod rank, click “Apply fusion.” A window will ask you to confirm that you want to spend the listed amount of Endo and credits. Click yes, and voilà! Your mod has now been upgraded.
If you need more Endo to burn, the easiest way to get it is to dissolve mods you don’t need. You can also gain large amounts of Endo from Sortie missions or by trading Ayatan Sculptures to Maroo at her Bazaar orbiting Mars.
How to Increase Your Equipment’s Mod Capacity
Each Warframe, weapon, companion, and archwing has a particular, unchanging number of mod slots, ranging from eight to ten. Though you can’t increase the maximum number of mod slots, you can increase your equipment’s mod capacity—a piece of equipment’s mod capacity limits which mods can be equipped according to their drain. For example, if you have nine points of mod capacity left on a piece of equipment, you can only equip mods with a drain of nine or lower.
So how can you increase this capacity to equip more powerful mods? The most straightforward way is to increase your own Mastery Rank. As you increase your Mastery Rank, the maximum mod capacity for all your equipment also increases. This maximum mod capacity is reached for each piece of equipment by leveling it up to Rank 30.
However, there’s still room to improve; even after being ranked up to its max rank, a piece of equipment can still have its mod capacity doubled by using an Orokin Reactor or Orokin Catalyst. You can also technically increase your equipment’s mod capacity by installing Forma, which changes the polarity of one mod slot. When a mod is installed on a mod slot of the same polarity, its drain is cut in half, creating room for more mods and mod upgrades. Finally, installing Aura mods on Warframes and Stance mods on melee weapons will increase the Warframe or weapon’s mod capacity rather than drain it.
Modded to Perfection
Modding is integral to the Warframe experience and crucial to standing up to higher-level missions and enemies. Keep collecting mods, increasing your mod capacity, and cracking open Rivens to become the best, most modified Tenno you can be!
