This guide shows how to efficiently use time over the course of casual play to gather platinum (in-game paid currency for Warframe) via trades. It is not the guide that will get you the best price for your money but it will net you a reasonable amount of platinum quickly by selling to the lowest price, as well as show you how to quickly price check your items and find relics to use in void fissure missions once you've obtained your Void Relic Segment. http://warframe.wikia.com/wiki/Relic

1. Mastery Rank 12

You cannot trade things you're mastery rank locked out of. The vast majority of what will get you loot will be at this rank. However, you can still obtain parts for mastery rank locked items through normal gameplay, so this is more of a loose requirement for actually obtaining things to sell.

Your mastery rank also determines the amount of trades you can make per day which resets at 12:00 UTC every day. (for reference that's 8 PM EST, 7PM CST etc.)

Given that increasing your mastery rank by crafting random crap and using it to farm lower level relics increases your credit reserve over time, you should be trying to do all these things at once rather than fighting the toughest enemies possible all the time. Equip only one weapon at a time and use a frame modded for power efficiency that kills eximus units and heavies efficiently, preferably with corrosive (electric + toxin mod) damage.

2. 1 Million Credits

Trade taxes eat into your credits and some individual (non-prime, non-special-weapon) pieces can cost hundreds of thousands to millions in trade taxes. Prime Mods in particular are best obtained from Baro Ki'teer and should be avoided trading for, for this reason.

3. Relics

Fastest way to get a large pile of relics is to play excavation/survival endless missions under void fissure mission categories. A half hour in either game mode will net you around a dozen relics (5 rounds of survival guarantees an exceptional relic which saves you some void traces over time). Good frames for these two game modes are Equinox (heavily modded for permaslow aura and blind rage), Frost/Frost Prime, Trinity, Nidus and Ember with a special mention for Atlas and Limbo.

Once you have a reasonable amount of relics, you focus exclusively on the Void Fissure missions and farming relics in between. You do not have to refine the relics you're using because you're generally not after a specific part: You're trying to leech off the rare drops of other players.

Your goal is to idly complete sets by picking up parts you have no copies of. This is the reason the frames in the prerequisites were listed, they're very survivable frames that can farm in sub-par conditions, but you usually don't want to go very far beyond level 60 or 80 enemies depending on how heavily modded your weaponry is and how many large health/energy restores you brought.

Don't spend too long doing this on a given day. Do it for an hour or two and then stop and either quit playing Warframe or farm up syndicate faction points: Random yellow items and certain whites are as valuable as certain faction weapons like Telos Boltor or Sancti Tigris.

Remember not to try to farm any specific relic, this will just stress you out when a part you need doesn't drop. Leech off other people's drops for your own sanity, but you must have a relic to be able to qualify for a drop.

The only time you would play a given survival cycle with no relic equipped is if you need void traces and the survival drop and are willing to exclude yourself from the drop table.

Special note regarding fissure excavations: These suck major ass because reactant drops rarely keep up with the pace of the excavators players want to chew through. If you play this mode, be sure to stick with the majority of the team since void fissures tend to open near-exclusively in the vicinity of the host.

Now you have a pile of prime parts, preferably 1-5 sets of items from farming anywhere from a few days to a week, a half hour to 2 hours every other day or so. I want to emphasize this can be done entirely in casual play.

Now you're ready to play the market. But part of playing the market is knowing how to find a buyer without getting lost in spam or sitting AFK for hours at a time.

Few rules of thumb:

- Your three options in order of preference for selling items to get a buyer quickly and the best price are: Warframe.Market, Maroo's Bazaar, Trade Channel (circular arrow icon on the chat window in the console in-game accessed via 'T' key)

- Use Warframe.Market (literally just warframe.market in the browser) for price checks and the majority of your sales. It's free to use, takes almost no signup. Use it to browse market prices in platinum for your items you're selling or to find buyers selling missing set parts for cheap, which you can then turn over for a profit with your whole set.

- When selling parts, always sell at the lowest price or 1-5 plat below that. The reason is it immediately puts you at the top of the list and in front of the eyes of buyers within SECONDS.

- If you sell a part, immediately alt-tab out and click 'Sold' on your part order on warframe.market. This is more difficult to do on a day where you're making lots of trades. If you don't do this you risk losing track of your transactions and have more demand than you do supply.

- If you hear a chime noise, it's a Warframe.Market PM. These are a priority response, particularly to ward off people on the wrong console (but they generally should be contacting you in-game anyway)

- If you are trying to sell Vaulted Prime Parts (parts no longer in circulation) then the rule of thumb is to buy the missing part no matter the cost if you are missing only 1 part of a 4 part set, but if you only have 2 parts of a 4 part set, to sell the vaulted pieces individually for plat or trade for missing set pieces still in circulation. This is where Maroo's Bazaar comes in handy, as Warframe.Market is exclusively for trading in plat, not bartering.

- Maroo's Bazaar is for junk and random part trades only. It's generally for batering, and inefficient for plat trading. Do not try to sell entire sets, it's not an efficient use of your time. That being said, visiting the Bazaar from time to time can net you parts the RNG hasn't dropped you at below-market prices. As a rule of thumb people in the Bazaar are trying to dump off their merchandise quickly or in extremely rare cases are trying to rip off a lazy or not-so-savvy buyer. If they wanted market prices they would be trading in a different way.

- Always make sure your online indicator is up to date in warframe.market since your online/offline indicator is really 'Ready To Sell' not so much 'Online'.

- Be polite. Be professional. Keep conversations short. Only haggle/allow other players to haggle (buyer is 5 plat short for instance or does not want the complete set but wants the majority of the parts at a discount) BEFORE the buyer is in your dojo on the trade screen, never with the trade screen actually up. Try not to sell incomplete sets or falsely advertise. Everyone makes mistakes but you do have a seller reputation to build up that depends on you making quick and accurate transactions with minimal fuss or extra chatter. A good sense of humor is helpful but keep things businesslike.

- Be willing to abort your missions to make a sale. Warframe.market moves quickly so you can't afford to alt tab out or not be paying attention to your chat box. If you are getting no bites in an hour, turn your indicator off and continue playing normally.

- Hold your trash items that are impossible to get rid of for the ducat kiosk. Occasionally Baro Ki'Teer sells items you can hold onto until after he leaves and then make a small profit selling them for plat yourself.

As you amass platinum you can use the plat to buy potatoes, slots, or more importantly, use other people's money to buy your frames complete with a slot and catalyst without having to do an even more frustrating run for parts that have literally a lower droprate than most prime parts you could be selling. You can also become a 'whale' buyer yourself, dropping 120 to 150 plat on new frame sets or 300p on out-of-circulation frame sets without batting an eyelash or emptying your wallet on that mythical 75% plat discount.

- Faction weaponry is a great way to get a guaranteed drop, and therefore guaranteed plat. The time you spend farming up 125k faction is worth about 75 percent of the time you'd have spent doing fissure missions for parts drops, but don't get caught up in sigil hunting. It's not your primary source of income, leeching rare drops is. You need an extra weapon slot(s) to hold your merchandise while you do this.

- If you need credits, farm Hieracon for relics on Pluto. It's a high level infested mission with a 20k a run drop on credits. You can either farm for relics or just do one excavator and bug out. For obvious reasons it's preferable you farm it to about 1200 Cryotic and then leave before it gets actually difficult for better modded weaponry.

- Excavation and Survival mission rewards for relics are based on tiers and these tiers are based on the mission's starting level, they do not change as the enemies scale upward making it preferable to exit and restart missions at 900-1200 Cryotic or 20 minutes on Survival missions.

- Provided for convenience are links to the Warframe Wiki pages for reward tiers for Excavation, Defense, Spy (soloable with Limbo, Ivara, or Loki, try not to bring radial faction procs to high level grineer tilesets due to sensor laser bots), and Survival missions:

http://warframe.wikia.com/wiki/Excavation

http://warframe.wikia.com/wiki/Survival

http://warframe.wikia.com/wiki/Defense

http://warframe.wikia.com/wiki/Spy

- You can tailor your reward types by the mission type you play. For example, Mot in the Void has a special Tier 4 drop table where practically everything is credits and relics. Defense has a more even spread of relic types across their tiers. Excavations drop the most relics, period.

- Remember that your goal is to do as many prime parts runs as possible, to this end you do not need to refine anything even if the relic you're equipping has a rare part you want. Anecdotally, refinement does not significantly improve your chances of getting a specific part to the extent it probably ought to given the work involved anyway so you should let other people refine their relics and instead save your void traces for pet projects like 4 man keyshares with specific relics or crafting derelict vault keys.

- Corrupted Mods sell for 5-25 plat depending on rarity with frame mods selling the fastest. However, getting ahold of these requires spending your void traces crafting Orokin Derelict Keys for Orokin Derelict Extermination or Capture missions, finding the vaults, and then extracting. You usually would do this with friends and clanmates who have nothing to do for an hour and need plat as well, but you can advertise on the recruitment channel for 3 other bodies to hold all 4 types of keys (Bleeding, Decaying, Hobbled, and Extinguished). You would put these on frames least disadvantaged by each penalty and swap the keys around so people don't get bored from time to time. They take only 60s to craft but are expensive to craft in bulk.

http://warframe.wikia.com/wiki/Dragon_Key
http://warframe.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Corrupted_Mods

Prime Part Sets will get you more plat, but to get plat quickly, faction weaponry, faction mods and corrupted mods are best to research on Warframe.Market once each is obtained.

- Spy Missions are a great alternative to solo matchmaking rank up gear for mastery rank if you craft a large pile of cheap ciphers and focus on getting the undetected affinity bonuses. It's not critical for you to do every run flawlessly, but 15-30 minutes a day doing Spy missions will rank up your gear surprisingly fast on Loki or Limbo. With undetected bonuses you can walk out of missions with 10-25-45k affinity depending on the difficulty of the mission and how many eximus units you assassinate in stealth, with faster runs being more important than stealth. Spy missions with at least two data vaults completed guarantee a relic drop. Ferrite is not as rare as it used to be, which makes crafting 30 or so ciphers permanently on your gear bar a good idea anyway.