What Is Prime Junk?
If you spend time in Warframe trade chat, you’ll likely see offers involving “prime junk.” This refers to Prime parts and blueprints sold in bulk based on their ducat exchange value. The buyer typically plans to cash these items in for ducats to trade with Baro Ki’Teer. As with other bulk trades, sets of 6 items are usually preferred—and sometimes explicitly required by the buyer—to make the best use of daily trade slots.
In setting prices for prime junk, only the ducat value of the item (“Can be exchanged for x ducats”) is considered; the set it belongs to is irrelevant. Thus, Paris Prime Grip and Ash Prime Neuroptics Blueprint could both be considered “45-ducat prime junk”; Ivara Prime Neuroptics Blueprint and Orthos Prime Handle would both be “15-ducat prime junk.” Any of those four items could be sold individually to someone who specifically sought them out, but then they would not be considered “junk.”
In trade chat, the ducat symbol is usually written as an emoji via the in-game :ducats: shortcode. For instance, the message below is an offer to buy 6 pieces of 45-ducat prime junk for 3 platinum each (18 total) or 6 pieces of 25-ducat prime junk for 2 platinum each (12 total). It’s possible, indeed likely, that this person would accept a mix of 45- and 25-ducat pieces in a single trade.
Should I Sell My Prime Parts/BPs as Junk?
If you get lots of duplicate parts and blueprints while cracking Void Relics, selling them as prime junk can be a good way to make some extra platinum—especially if you don’t need the ducats yourself. Still, it can be unwise to rush into junk sales without checking the items’ individual prices on a site like Warframe Market. To go back to a previous example, it makes sense to sell a Paris Prime Grip as junk because (as of mid-Feb 2022) this item trades for only a few platinum by itself. It would be a dubious move, though, to sell the Ash Prime Neuroptics Blueprint as junk, since its market price is currently much higher than its typical junk value of 2 or 3 plat.
Ultimately, it’s a balancing act: junk sales are usually quick and convenient, with lots of offers in trade chat at peak times. And since there’s no need to seek out a separate buyer for each item, time is saved and trade slots are used efficiently. The downside is that selling some items as junk means selling them at a steep discount—and the rarer the item, the steeper that discount tends to be.
