Throughout Warframe, polymer bundles are one of the main resources you’ll run out of, along with nano spores, ferrite, plastids, rubedo, pretty much everything really.
With certain blueprints like 100x energy pads using 5k polymer bundles per craft, amongst the many other warframe parts and weapons they’re needed for, you can very quickly blow through an entire stash.
Best missions to farm polymer bundles
Ophelia, Uranus
I’ve listed Ophelia at the top for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, polymer bundles drop quite frequently from enemies and crates around the map. While the map itself features a good amount of chokepoints you can set up shop in. This lends itself well to a Hydroid with Pilfering Swarm.
Secondly, you can farm for condition overload at the same time by killing drekar butchers that are found in this tileset. This is a relatively good mod that has a place in several later game builds. It’s also quite rare with a 3% chance for a mod to drop from the butcher, then a further 0.67% for Condition Overload to drop after that, so this can give you a nice head start in farming for it.
Assur, Uranus
Assur is another great farming spot with a small chokepoint heavy tileset, making it great for lootframes like Hydroid and Khora.
Being a dark sector survival, Assur will see you fighting against the infested.
It offers you a +25% resource drop chance bonus and a bonus to affinity which slightly offsets the lower affinity you get from killing infested anyway.
This drop chance booster will increase the amount of polymer bundles that drop from slain enemies
Fortuna bounties
Sticking with the theme of farming multiple things at once. Fortuna bounties are also another good way to farm polymer bundles, alongside all the other resources you’ll need from bounties, including Garuda parts, relics and debt bonds.
Fortuna bounties also give you the opportunity to start building up your Solaris United standing. This is a great idea to do as soon as you feel comfortable because the daily standing cap will greatly slow down your farming if you ever want to rush standing progression.
Other polymer bundle farming tips
Bring lootframes
Yes. Like any resource farm you’ll do in Waframe. Lootframes make it so much quicker.
Using Nekros’s Desecrate gives you extra chances for looting an enemies body parts after killing it. To make the most of this, bring a slash based weapon. This will split enemies into more body parts, so more chances for goodies for us.
Hydroid is also another good choice. His Pilfering Swarm gives a 100% drop chance increase to any enemies held by a tentacle, it doesn’t even have to kill them. My favourite method is to bring a duration Hydroid, find a chokepoint, press 4, move back a bit and spam exodia contagion or another AoE based weapon into the tentacles. This will easily deal with most enemies in a Survival, just remember to keep your 4 active to make the most of each enemy.
Bring a Smeeta
Bring the catto! Smeeta is another great addition to your farming kit. Smeeta’s mod, charm gives you a 28% chance for one of a variety of buffs every 27 seconds.
One of these bonuses is a double affinity and resource drops for 120 seconds. This stacks with any lootframe bonuses, any resource booster youmight have on and can even stack with itself if your were to get it twice within that 120 window, dramatically reducing farming time needed.
Bring your friends
Or to a point, randoms. More players mean more enemies. More enemies mean more loot pinatas. This works even better in an organised group where you’re all happy to just sit and farm for a while.
Buy boosters
Yes, this is a perfectly valid idea, especially if you’ve already built up a nice stack of platinum from trading prime parts.
Boosters in Warframe greatly reduce the time needed to farm for items. You just want to pick up the right ones, not all are equal.
For starters, the resource booster is always a good one, literally doubles the amount of resources you get from drops.
The credit booster literally doubles the amount of credits you get from missions and drops.
The Affinity booster doubles the experience you get for killing enemies and being in range of allies who kill enemies.
The resource drop chance booster is, in my opinion, the worst of the boosters. It doubles the chance that each resource drops, making it a somewhat unreliable booster.
We however, are mostly interested in the resource booster as this guarantees any resources we get have been doubled, theoretically halving the time it takes. If you also want to grab some quick credits or level some gear, the affinity and credit boosters are also good choices.
Don’t buy the resource bundles
While they may look enticing, they’re incredibly expensive. At 30 plat for 300 polymer bundles, it makes our energy pads from earlier cost around 500 platinum, and you’d have to do this multiple times, not even counting every other craft that wants polymer bundles.
That plat is MUCH more useful somewhere else, you could buy TWO 30 day boosters and still have some plat leftover.
Or you could spend it all on some sick fashionframing 😊