Ultimate Mining Guide – Warframe

The guide for all things mining, after reading this you can brag to all your friends and family about all the gems you got and throw your digital gems at their face and show just how much time you spent sitting in your chair doing nothing.

Summary

Mining is easy, find the glowing rock you want to mine, pull out the Cutter you have on hand, stand a few meters away, use secondary (alternate) fire to zoom further in, then wait a bit so the Cutter can scan the rock, then trace the outline as best you can.

Let’s go over the UI real quick

The Cut Quality determines how much loot you’ll get, this is determined by how closely and quickly you follow the white outline, closeness to the outline outweighs speed.
The distance from the nearest Rock in meters.
Number of Rocks the Cutter can detect nearby, mostly redundant.

Mining Basics

Locating Rocks: You can find ore by looking around the landscape or by equipping a Cutter and using its pings to tell where it is, the pings will intensify frequency and volume the closer you’re looking at a Rock. Rocks are only found on stone, that means not on sentient bones or metal, they are also frequently found in caves. The Advanced Nosam Cutter will also highlight Rocks on your map in a range of fifty meters.

Mining Rocks: To mine a Rock, Equip you cutter, go between 4-6 meters away, wait about two seconds while aiming at it, zoom in with your Cutter using the alternate fire, and trace the white outline as best you can, if you go too slow you’ll have to trace some of it from memory.

Other Cutter Uses: Silly string based on your warframe’s energy color, also deals extremely low damage. (Low enough damage that it doesn’t create numbers.)

Resource Boosters and Kavat Charm buffs do apply to gained ores/gems.

Rocks and their respective drops

The Red rocks are Ores, they will drop the following: Pyrol, Coprun, Ferros, and Auron.

The Blue rocks are Gemstones, they will drop the following: Azurite, Devar, Veridos, and Crimzian. If you have the Advanced Nosam Cutter they’ll also drop Sentirum and Nyth.

Common Locations for Mining

Area #1 has many Rocks in the cave.
Area #2 is where you’ll do most of your mining.
Area #3 is worth mining at if a bounty brings you there.
Area #4 has some rocks and is nice when you’re returning from stuff.
Area #5 is the same as Area #3.