Animal Instinct – A Valuable Mod

There are many, many mods in Warframe. Mods for Warframes, mods for weapons, mods for your companions. Including cats and dogs. I don’t know where we store the mods we equip on our living companions, but they can use them nonetheless. However, many mods are also kinda useless. They’re either niche or just impractical. And because there is limited space, some mods have to be left out.

Today, I want to talk about the one mod I 100% can’t leave out from my companions’ mods.

A required mods for pets

Animal Instinct is a Nightmare mod, obtainable from high level Nightmare missions, which tend to have negative modifiers attached to them. However, it is worth the time farming Nightmare missions because this mod is amazing. With enemy radar, you can pick out the denser areas of enemies, see where they are coming from and swiftly kill them all. Very useful on Exterminate missions, trying to find hidden enemies. With loot radar, loot crates are marked with symbols on your minimap. You can also use it to find things like Cephalon cubes, Ayatan sculptures and the annoying dropped feathers from Void Angels.

What makes Animal Instinct so good is that you combine both into a single mod, and with pretty good stats. Any time you can take one mod instead of two and get a similar result is always a good thing.

And then we have Primed Animal Instinct

Primed Animal Instinct is just flat out better. More expensive to use, but frankly worth it. +55 loot radar is huge and +33 enemy sense is pretty good too. Animal Instinct’s enemy radar bonus is the same as using Enemy Sense or Vigilante Pursuit, but you get loot radar as well. Loot radar is pretty rare, actually, and is only present on four mods. Two of which are Animal Instinct. The other two mods are Thief’s Wit (+42 loot radar) and Loot Detector (+30 loot radar for your whole team). But no one really uses these mods because they take up space on a Warframe, and there are far better aura mods you can use.

The only downside is the drain of mod slots. Primed Animal Instinct costs 16 capacity to equip, and if you want to add more maxed out mods, you will definitely need some Forma. Fitting on health mods AND precept mods AND Primed Animal Instinct requires a ton of capacity. Heck, Primed Animal Instinct alone costs over 1/2 of a level 30 companion, or 1/4 of an unforma’d but potato’d companion.

You can stack Animal Instinct

What’s nice though is that you can use other radar mods alongside Animal Instinct. So if the +55 loot radar (30 on the normal version) isn’t enough for you, you can always add Thief’s Wit for additional loot detection. The same applies with enemy radar. Equipping Primed Animal Instinct, Enemy Sense, Vigilante Pursuit, Stealth Drift and the aura Enemy Radar for a grand total of over 140% total enemy radar. Stick all of those on an Ivara and you get even more. You end up seeing every enemy on the map.

That’s just going overboard though. You’re better off just using Primed Animal Instinct. It’s more than plenty.

As a final fun fact, you can actually double your Primed Animal Instinct. Venari, Khora’s pet cat, can use all the same mods as normal Kavats can. So you can put Primed Animal Instinct on both, giving yourself +110 loot radar and +60 enemy sense, from technically just one mod. Granted, this is only for Khora, but plenty of people play as the sexy BDSM cat lady, so it is worth knowing.