Warframe’s fast-paced combat belies a lot of arduous, time consuming crafting. The upside is that it’s the best way to gain new gear to take on the loot shooter’s toughest challenges, however the downside is that it’s as complicated as nearly everything else in the game. There’s a mountain of blueprints, materials, and currencies to consider, and Warframe rarely makes it clear how to get them all.
That’s why we’ve compiled this guide. It’ll show you the basics of crafting and collecting everything you need to conquer the solar system. It may not help you shift the numbers in your favor, as Warframe is still a very grind-heavy game that can take hours to give you that one key item you need to progress, but we can show you where to go to get what you want and how best to spend your time. So let’s dive right into the crafting process.
Blueprints
Crafting in Warframe simply doesn’t start without blueprints. These puppies are the backbone for pretty much everything you make, wear, or use throughout the game - from the Warframes themselves to consumable items like health packs and hacking devices.
Blueprints are acquired in numerous ways. The easiest and most common is to simply buy them from the in-game marketplace. If you’re totally new to this free-to-play romp, the market is the holographic display located to the front and starboard of your personal ship. Its interface is then split into categories like primary and secondary weapons, or companions and keys.
Items in the marketplace can be bought either with credits or Platinum. The former is currency you’ll earn mostly from just playing the game. It’s a necessary component in most items you craft, too. So when purchasing a blueprint with the stuff make sure you have enough credits saved up to cover the cost of the plans and the actual construction.
Platinum is almost always used for buying items wholecloth, without the need for blueprints at all. The major exception is that certain rare crafting materials - Orokin Cells, Neurodes, Neural Sensors - all have blueprints that cost 100 Platinum apiece.
That’s 100 Platinum for a permanent blueprint, mind you. Unlike some crafting schematics these ones aren’t consumed when you build them. In fact, if you’ve got premium currency to burn, these blueprints aren’t the worst purchases you could make. The three rare components can be a real pain to find in the wild sometimes and since these schematics can be reused indefinitely their lifetime value is pretty much infinite, although their crafting costs are exorbitant.
Those, like most blueprints, may be found on the marketplace, but many, many more need to be found in other ways. Some of which we’ll get into in specific detail in this guide. Others are a little too esoteric for what they offer to get their own sections. Suffice it to say that, besides buying them on the market, some are only available as daily login rewards, from time-limited Alert missions, during special in-game events, at the ends of quests, or as drops from bosses and unique enemy types.
Whatever you intend to make, there’s a real-world wait time that starts once you begin building off the blueprint. This can last anywhere from one minute for smaller items to more than three days for full Warframes.
If you’re impatient, you can spend varying amounts of Platinum to rush the job and complete it immediately. We advise against it, however, as general Warframe wisdom holds this to be the worst way to spend your premium currency. Just be patient, okay? You can always kill time by going out on missions to hunt for more resources to build more items - which we’re about to cover in the next section.
