If you've played Warframe for a while then it's trivial to navigate to Venus and jump into the new Fortuna expansion. However, if you're new, you need to get off Earth and improve your gear to survive the expansion's introductory mission. Here's a guide to getting there as quickly as possible. You could be grinding rails with a K-Board in just a few hours.
Fight your way to the Venus Junction
First, access the star chart at the front of your Orbiter. To begin with this is your main way of accessing missions in Warframe. Check out our full Warframe beginner's guide for more detailed tips for taking on the star chart.
For now, let's focus on getting to Venus. Before you can relocate your Orbiter to a new planet you need to complete the prerequisites for the Venus Junction node at the bottom of Earth's star chart. Let's look at each objective.
Complete Vor's Prize
This series of missions introduces you to the Warframe universe and conveniently charts a path from the first node at E-Prime, through Mariana, Mantle, Gaia and Cambria, to the Venus Junction. Simply follow the objectives to push through the quest and ruin Vor's day.
Collect 20 mods
Mods look like cards, and they drop from enemies as you fight through the star chart. By running missions on Earth you should naturally acquire enough mods to complete this objective quickly.
Apply 4 mods to a Warframe or Weapon
Mods are essential to powering up your gear, so it's worth learning how to equip them early. In time you will be hunting down specific mods to make certain builds and weapons extremely powerful, but for now it's good to make a habit of auto installing them between missions.
To do this, in your escape menu on your Orbiter navigate to 'equipment' and select 'arsenal' to see your gear. Select 'upgrade' on the Warframe or weapon you want to outfit, then click 'actions' at the bottom and 'auto install'. The game will automatically apply a balanced loadout from the mods you've collected.
You level up your Warframe and weapons by running missions. Levelling up unlocks more mod capacity, which means you can install more stat bonuses. Some common mods greatly increase your health, armour, and shields. If you're struggling to stay alive, consider upgrading those using the next step in the Venus Junction requirements.
Upgrade any mod using Fusion
In your 'arsenal' menu, select 'mods' at the bottom of the screen. The mods interface lets you select individual mods so you can upgrade them, sell them, or melt them down for Endo.
Upgrading a mod costs Endo and Credits, and will increase the Capacity requirement of the mod. At this early stage consider upgrading common mods like Vitality that can give you up to 120 percent extra health. Straight damage boosts, like Serration for rifles, are good too. We can worry about elemental damage and ability efficiency deeper into the Star Chart. if you run out of Endo just melt down duplicate mods. You will end up with a lot of duplicates.
Destroy the Specter
In the Venus Junction you will face off with a Specter. These bosses are dark reflections of Warframes with similar abilities—this one is the Rhino Warframe, which means he's resilient. However, if you have been installing and upgrading your mods, this guy shouldn't be too much trouble.
If you're using the default Excalibur Warframe then you can radial blind to freeze the Specter in place while you shoot it in the face, or carve it up with your exalted blade. Apparently if you're running Volt, before you bring the shield down you can run around in circles to build charge, then throw up your own shield and headshot the Specter for a lot of damage. This might even kill it outright.
Fight your way to Fortuna
We're almost there. Run E Gate and Unda missions on the Venus star chart and you will unlock access to Fortuna. This underground facility serves as a gateway to the massive new Orb Vallis zone added by the Warframe: Fortuna expansion. To fully explore, you need to complete the introductory Vox Solaris quest. It has multiple stages and unless you've been exploring more of the star chart, you will probably need to grow more powerful to complete it and gain access to the expansion proper.
Rank up and get stronger
There's no shortcut to leveling in Warframe, you just have to run a lot of missions. It will be a smoother ride if you have a good weapon, though. Boltor is a good early-game rifle that gets strong with mods and, as an added bonus, pins enemies to walls. Beat the Mercury Junction on Venus to get the Boltor blueprint, or head to the 'Market' section of your escape menu and search for 'Boltor'. Craft this as quickly as you can and you'll notice a big damage increase over your default gun. Once you hit Mastery Rank 4, build a Hek shotgun. Run missions on Earth to get the required Neurodes.
In terms of surviving missions and killing enemies, your mods, weapons and your Warframe are more important than your overall Mastery Rank. Ultimately you will want to increase your Mastery Rank to gain access to new weapon tiers, however. Every time a Warframe or weapon levels up, your Mastery rank fills up a little more. Once it's maxed out you can use the escape menu to access a once-a-day trial Mastery. Once you've beaten the trial your rank will increase.
Defense missions are a good way to level up new equipment because you kill so many enemies and you can push the mission as far as your gear can take it. Craft cheap weapon blueprints, then travel back to Earth to take on a low-level defense mission and stick it out for as long as you can. You will level your gear, pick up a bunch of mods, and pick up some Relics, which you will want to unlock later for pieces of high-level gear. Avoid bringing along maxed out level 30 weapons, as these will suck a share of your XP gain away from other weapons you have equipped. Find out more about how affinity XP is distributed on the Warframe wiki.
For the Vox Solaris quest you will need to take a lot of fire, and in some defense sections strong area-of-effect damage is useful for clearing the field. Something to bear in mind if you have access to multiple Warframes.
Once you're finally able to roam Orb Vallis you'll want to take to the skies, so here's our guide to using your Archwing in the expansion. To unlock many of the expansion's new features you will need to earn standing with the Solaris United faction. Good luck!
