Farming for Kuva

Farming for Kuva is one of the most tedious things in Warframe ever. There are few things on the same level as Kuva farming. Defection and the Infested Salvage mission to farm for Nidus mostly. But at least the reward of getting Nidus is totally worth it, and once you have that lone Harrow part, you can ignore Defection completely. The farm for Ivara might be tedious but Spy missions are always good to learn, considering they’re common in Sorties. Kuva though, it’s a resource in multiple weapons and you need a TON of it for re-rolling riven mods.

Kuva missions appear on planets near the Kuva Fortress, which drifts around the solar system in a lazy pattern, looking for Kuva. There are two versions: Kuva Siphons with level 25-30 enemies and Kuva Floods with level 100+ enemies.

Of course, you need your space kid to farm for Kuva. Your Warframe is basically just there for a bit of crowd control. Depending on what frame you take and how much Focus you’ve shoved into your Operator, you might not need your Warframe at all. But it’s easier to have a Warframe nearby, especially if they can provide a lot of crowd control. Someone like Nova, who can slow enemies around her with ease. Or Vauban with his Bastille, which suspends enemies in midair. Invisibility is always an option on certain mission types too, since you can leave your Warframe invisible while you leap out of your body to jump through black and red clouds. There are lots of options.

The problem is, the whole Kuva Siphon mission makes no sense. So the Grineer Queen, the little worm girl with the weird hairdo, dumps a siphon and a bunch of enemies and just waits for the siphon to suck up a handful of clouds of Kuva. But the braids that suck up the clouds of Kuva randomly explode when they fail to pick anything up, despite the fact this siphon they’ve made is otherwise invincible. Rather than sending more and more reinforcements and overwhelming you, the Grineer Queen just whinges and threatens to execute her minions. If she didn’t announce her presence in the first place, then MAYBE she’d actually be able to gather some Kuva once in a while.

All the while you’re standing around, waiting for dumb black clouds. Really, half the mission is waiting for the damn clouds to spawn. Clouds of black and red that either spawn right on top of the siphon, giving you a few seconds to capture it, or spawn a mile away and get stuck on every little corner imaginable, making you stand there like a twat wondering where the cloud is. The only thing that can help you here is your Codex/Simaris Scanner, as it’ll highlight both enemies and Kuva through walls.

The Lotus makes all of this far worse. The shit she says has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with the actual mission. She knows what a Kuva Siphon does. You can’t damage the siphon. She doesn’t tell you what to do in Space Kid mode. You can’t attack any of the braids even after catching some Kuva. And the bitch scolds you for letting the siphon suck up some Kuva when she STILL hasn’t told you what to do! The Lotus is utterly useless.

These days though, there are options. Sort of. There are other sources of Kuva available, but whether they are easier or harder than doing Siphons and Floods is up to you. Sorties have a chance to reward you with 6000 Kuva, which is a genuinely good reward since that’s either 10 Kuva Siphon missions or 5 Kuva Floods’ worth of Kuva, but you can only do a sortie once a day and the chance of Kuva is uncommon at best. You can also get 100-300 Kuva at a time as a reward for Bounties on the Plains of Eidolon, but there are far, far better things you could be getting from Bounty rewards.

That being said, there is that shiny new Kuva Survival mission that came out a few days ago and I already rambled about, but it’s a survival mission re-purposed into an excavation mission, which means solo players are screwed over due to fewer enemy spawns.

But if you’re serious about rerolling your Riven Mods, it’s going to be hard. Most notably because Smeeta Kavats, with their chances to double loot for a short amount of time, no longer work while you are in Operator Mode. Tricks like Nekros’s Desecrate have never worked, so you have no choice but to get 600 Kuva at a time. The only way to get more is to let someone else grab the Kuva Clouds while your Smeeta Kavat gives you the buff (which it rarely does, because it’s a cat and it’s a bastard that does what it wants) or you get a resource booster, which doubles your earnings, no matter what.

Oh, and you’ll also need Kuva for a handful of weapons and Warframes – Nidus, the Kesheg, Zarr, Twin Rogga and Orvius for example.

Either way, farming for Kuva really, really, really, really sucks. A necessary evil.