If you’ve been around for a short while you may have heard the terms vaulting and unvaulting being thrown around. If you haven’t, well, you have now.
What is Vaulting?
Vaulting is a term in Warframe communities that refers to prime weapons and prime warframes “entering the vault”.
So, what is the Vault?
Well, all the relics you farm for are only farmable for a few months at a time, after this, they will be placed into the vault and won’t drop from missions anymore. The vault holds all the prime weapons and Warframes that are currently not in rotation, meaning relics that hold parts for them won’t drop.
Why do relics get vaulted?
Relics will get vaulted when its time for some of the items they drop to be taken out of drop tables for missions. Don’t worry though, any vaulted parts will come out the vault in future, in a process called unvaulting which we’ll get to in a bit.
What happens to my vaulted relics then?
Nothing, absolutely nothing will happen. You’ll still have all the relics you farmed for and you can still open them in void fissures like normal. The only difference is you can’t get any more relics containing vaulted parts. This means relics containing vaulted parts will become rarer as time passes and worth a few more platinum if that’s what you’re into.
You mentioned unvaulting earlier, what’s that?
Unvaulting is pretty much the exact opposite of vaulting. Whenever a vaulting happens, usually every few months, an unvaulting will happen as well, where certain weapons and Warframes are taken out the vault and put back in the drop tables.
Is there any way I can see what’s vaulted and what isn’t?
Unfortunately not really, there’s no official schedule for vaultings and unvaultings from the developers so there’s a lot of educated guesswork from the community using previous vaulting times.
All we do know is that it’s a rotation, when something gets vaulted, something else gets unvaulted, usually in sets. For example, 2 Warframes and 3 weapons vaulted, the same amount will also be unvaulted.
If you want to know what’s currently in the vault, you can open the void relic menu in game and hover over some relics and press tab, it’ll then say if that relic is in the vault.
If it is, it means one or more of the parts in that relic has been vaulted and until it comes back out the vault, you can’t get that relic anymore.
You can also head on over to the Warframe Wiki and scroll down to the notes section to see a list of every prime, when it was vaulted and the date of the last unvaulting.
Whats the point of all this?
While it does seem purely like a way to gate content, that’s only part of the reason vaulting and unvaulting exists.
For one, if nothing got vaulted, the drop tables would be so incredibly diluted, farming for any specific item would be an absolute drag.
To add on to that, vaultings allow the price of prime parts to rise and fall and helps to stimulate the ingame economy. Something something supply and demand.
Final thoughts:
Ultimately, if this is the way that the devs want players to access certain content then so be it, it’s a rather controversial topic within the community but I don’t see it changing any time soon. For me though, I don’t have any real issues with the system. Its just a bit meh when you have to wait a year plus to get your favourite frame as a prime, unless you want to buy it from a player for platinum, which is also a perfectly valid option.