Ferrite farming is an unavoidable part of Warframe. It drops from loot containers and dead enemies on suitable planets and tilesets.
Ferrite is a commonly used resource in many crafting recipes, including weapons and pads. A ferrite starved player can easily run out of equipment to build, and when your building multiple items at a time, its easy to become starved.
Apollodorus, Mercury Survival
This is almost undisputedly the best mission to farm ferrite in. It’s a low level survival that pits you against a never ending horde of infested.
In this mission you’ll find a fair few containers and lockers that you can open for a chance to get drops. One of these drops may very well be the ferrite you’re after.
All you really need to do for this mission is run around the map and open every container you come across while killing as many enemies as you can. It sounds complex but is definitely easier than it sounds.
This is the result from a single 5 minute run on Apollodorus. No Boosters apart from a gamewide credit booster that was active at the time.
This run involved just opening every container I came across and killed enemies as they came to me.
For this run, I took a pilfering Strangledome Khora and just sat inside the dome for 5 minutes, recasting when I needed to. Enemies would run up and the dome would make light work of them, killing them and giving me bonus loot for the privilege.
I made no attempt to open containers this run. Although I could have done to boost the ferrite gain even more, I simply sat and let the dome do all the work.
This method can also be used for much longer than just the 5 minutes and the income should remain fairly consistent as its entirely gathered from enemy drops and the pilfering Strangledome augment.
Teshub, Void exterminate
Teshub is an exterminate mission against corrupted enemies. Fortunately for us, corrupted mobs can drop ferrite on death. Even more fortunately for us, Ferrite can be dropped by breaking or opening any of the containers around the void tilesets.
A low level exterminate is a good choice. It allows us to breeze through the enemies quickly and with relatively few problems. It also gives us ample chance to explore the void tilesets and keep an eye out for some of the challenge rooms, for a chance at extra loot.
For this run, I took an Ember built for 4 spamming to quickly clear the enemies and picked up their loot. Also picked up drops from opening containers around the map.
As you can see, this run netted me a not shabby 2318 ferrite for less than 10 minutes work. Obviously, because this is an exterminate mission though, you can’t stay in it indefinitely so you will find yourself sitting through a fair few loading screens.
Gaia, Earth interception
An interception mission located on Earth that will have you fighting Grineer to secure four points on the map.
This is a good choice because as it’s an interception mission, its endless, so you can stay in for as many waves as you want or until you feel your damage falling off.
However, interception missions generally have the smallest tileset, and by nature, less containers to loot. Placing less importance on options like Scavenge and more importance on enemy drops, so things like a Nekros may be more worth your while here.
On another note, Gaia is also a relatively good affinity farm. You just need to keep capturing points. Making it a good place to level weapons and Warframes, or if you’ve just Formad a weapon and need to rank it up quickly.
Eurasia, Earth mobile defense
Here we have a mobile defense mission on a tileset that can have rather a lot of containers to open, so Scavenge could really pay off here.
It also features pretty low levelled Grineer enemies who should be easy enough to kill and may drop ferrite on death as well.
Other tips to maximise efficiency:
Bring a lootframe.
Lootframes are a core part of the Warframe farming experience, by allowing you more chances for loot to drop, they can greatly decrease the amount of time you need to spend grinding away for resources.
Nekros
Without a doubt, the most commonly used Warframe for farming would be Nekros.
His 3rd ability, Desecrate applies to dead enemies in range and allows you to consume their corpses for a 54% chance to get an extra loot drop.
Interestingly, this can apply multiple times per enemy if they had body parts broken off with slash damage, gross right. For example, if you Tigris an enemy into 2 pieces, each of these pieces can be consumed separately, giving you 2 extra chances for loot.
Even more interestingly, Khora’s Strangledome can deal slash damage, meaning it can stack with Nekros for even more farming goodness.
Khora
We mentioned Khora above, but lets take a look into how her augment, pilfering strangledome can get you more materials.
For starters, Pilfering Strangledome is an augment to Khora’s 4th ability, Strangledome.
Strangledome places a dome made of chains where khora’s standing. This dome has a standard 5 metre radius that lasts for a base 20 seconds. Enemies in range of this dome are pulled in and stuck in it until the dome expires.
Any enemies stuck in the dome take damage per second, evenly split between Impact, Puncture and Slash. Its important to note here that for corpses to be dismembered, the damage from the dome needs to kill the enemy, or another slash based weapon at least.
Now, pilfering Strangledome simply adds a 65% chance that any enemy killed while stuck in the dome will drop extra loot; Making it good for solo runs, where you can rely on damage from Strangledome to kill enemies without a fuss.
Or, like mentioned above, we can pair Khora’s augment with a Nekros using Desecrate.
This works because Pilfering Strangledome is applied ON death to enemies, while Desecrate is applied AFTER death, so the two abilities won’t overlap and complement each other nicely.
Hydroid
The other popular Lootframe is Hydroid because of his 4th ability augment, Pilfering Swarm, yep, another Pilfering.
This augment adds a 100% chance for additional drops to ANY enemy killed while held by a tentacle.
So it doesn’t have to be the tentacle that kills them, just holding them.
Because it is another ability that applies on death, Pilfering swarm can also stack with a Nekros, however, it is less effective than Strangledome as the lack of slash damage means not as many enemies get dismembered.
Unfortunately though, because both Pilfering swarm and Pilfering strangledome apply their looting bonuses on death, they can’t stack with each other.
Bring scavenge
Scavenge is a wonderful mod that fits on any animal companion, Kubrow or Kavat, and gives a whopping +90% chance for your companion to unlock a locked container, allowing you to grab the loot inside. If successful, the container will turn green or white and you’ll be able to open it for loot. If unsuccessful, the light on the container will turn off completely.
Bring master thief
If for some reason, you don’t have, or don’t want to use scavenge, this mod makes a decent alternative.
Master thief is a neat little mod that gives you a +40% chance to make locked containers, unlocked. All you have to do is approach a locked container and the mod will try and unlock it, so you can open it like normal.
This doesn’t stack with Scavenge however. This is why it’s preferable to run Scavenge over Master thief as any containers Master thief fails to open will be locked for scavenge too and as Master thief is only a +40% chance, it makes sense to let Scavenge do the legwork with its +90%.
Bring a vacuum or fetch mod
This goes without saying really. When you’re trying to be quick, having resource drops come flying at you saves an incredible amount of time.
Run with friends for more enemy spawns in endless missions
Another good tip, especially in Survivals, is to bring more players in.
This causes more enemies to spawn and therefore gives you more chances for that sweet loot.
Even better if you can convince a friend to bring a lootframe as well.