Warframe: Fastest Way to Farm Aya

With the Prime Resurgence event now entering its “Last Chance” weeks, many Warframe players are likely wondering how to rack up that last bit of Aya to fill out their Prime wish list. Since the drop rates for Aya in each mission type are publicly available, it comes down to a question of which mission is fastest relative to the drop chance. I’ve played dozens of bounties and hundreds of missions, both solo and in groups, since the event went live, and here’s what I’ve found.

Quick Recs

If you’re doing bounties, the Fortuna ones offer the most bang for the buck. If you’re running non-bounty missions in the Void, the Tier 3 Capture mission at Ukko is by far the fastest. More specifically:

• If you are playing solo, consider running Ukko missions, which should net you about 2 Aya/hour.
• If you are playing with a group (friends or clan, not randos), start with Fortuna bounties at levels 30–50 and expect to see 3–4 Aya per hour.
• If your team is handling Fortuna 30–50 smoothly and consistently—including bonus objectives—try Fortuna 40–60 bounties, for a likely return of 4–5 Aya/hour.

Why These Missions?

Why Ukko for soloing?

The reasoning for the first recommendation is pretty simple. Capture missions are extremely fast relative to most other mission types, and Ukko is the higher-tier of the two Capture missions available in the Void. The handful of Void missions with better drop rates are all way slower mission types: Interception (Mithra), Survival (Mot), and Defense (Belenus). What’s more, the drop rates for Mithra and Mot don’t get really good until Rotation C.

Ukko’s drop rate of 8.33% means that, on average, you will need to run the mission 12 times to see one Aya. This sounds like a lot, but a typical Ukko run takes about 2 minutes—including the time it takes to load in and out. The dreaded “Change of Plans” event, which tacks on a short Exterminate objective to the mission, will bump that time up by just a couple of minutes. This seems to happen about 10% of the time on Capture missions, so the overall time per run is still well under 2:30. That number will go lower if:

• You have a frame that’s especially good for speed clearing, like Volt, Gauss, or Titania (or their Prime variants).
• You are very familiar with the Orokin Tower tileset and can avoid bonks / missed jumps / dead ends.

So that’s why you’d want to favor Ukko over other Void missions, but why would you want to favor it over bounties?

• Ukko is easy to solo consistently with even half-decent gear. You’re moving so quickly that there’s very little chance of getting overwhelmed by tough mobs. In the rare event that you do get KO’d, it’s still unlikely that you’ll fail the mission as a result. I have never once had an Ukko capture target actually escape—and I’ve run this mission a lot.
• Ukko is low-risk, with less scope for RNG and bugs to lead to a failed mission. With solo bounties, on the other hand, it’s easy to get painted into a corner by (say) a bad Case Capture setup.
• Because they are so bite-sized, Ukko runs fit in a lot of use cases where bounties don’t. It’s easy to run one or two while waiting for trade offers to come in or your Railjack crew to get online. Conversely, if you get interrupted by IRL nonsense and have to bail, you’re looking at 2 minutes of lost effort, not half an hour.

With that said, I don’t recommend running Ukko in a group, even with friends or clanmates. With multiple players, you’re effectively gated by everyone’s loading times, and if anyone takes longer than the rest of the team to reach the extraction point, everyone suffers that time loss too. These performance-gating factors can easily tack half a minute or more onto each mission.

Why Fortuna for groups?

Instead, if you are running with a group (or even in a duo), stick to bounties. To be clear, this means a group of “known friendlies” and not a random squad formed by the game’s matchmaking system. Randomly matched squads can work fine for things like Defense or Survival missions, where the team is often way overpowered relative to the mission requirements. They can be severely frustrating in bounties, though. If you’ve never matched into a bounty only to have half your team go off on a fishing/mining/conservation expedition instead, you’re truly blessed.

Some other guides recommend Deimos / Cambion Drift bounties as the fastest way to get Aya with a group. The rationale there is that the Cambion Drift map is more compact than Orb Vallis (Fortuna bounties) or the Plains of Eidolon (Cetus bounties). This in itself is true, but an Archwing Launcher narrows that gap considerably by making travel times low and terrain largely irrelevant. It’s also been said that Deimos bounty mission types are simpler and more straightforward than those in other zones. Again, that’s a fair point, but Deimos is also populated by huge, tanky mobs that can take forever to kill. In practice, this erases much of the advantage that Deimos has over nominally slower missions on Fortuna (like Case Capture or Coildrive Hack). Fortuna also has better overall Aya drop rates than Deimos.

With all that in mind, I recommend Fortuna as the best bounty site for Aya. A full 5-stage bounty at level 30–50 is worth about 0.9 Aya on average (with chances to drop on every stage after the first). At the 40–60 range, that bumps up to about 1.2 Aya per bounty. This doesn’t include the chance of an extra Aya if you complete the bonus objectives in each stage, something that is slightly easier to do at lower levels but can be annoyingly RNG-dependent. (Sluggish spawns on an Exterminate mission, or awkward case placement on a Case Capture? Welp, there goes your bonus.)

If everyone’s appropriately geared, focused, and playing in a coordinated fashion, the 40–60 bounties are a slightly superior pick, because the better Aya odds outstrip the added time cost of doing harder content. If folks are still leveling/learning new frames and gear, or just looking for a more casual experience, the 30–50 range is where it’s at—and that’s what my clanmates and I have ended up doing most nights.