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How and where to get Nitain Extract – Warframe

Oh, it's elusive alright.

Warframe hosts no small number of rare and elusive resources. Like any modern live-service game, it really wants to keep you around for a while, after all. The most elusive of all of these resources is Nitain Extract, as you can’t just go farming willy-nilly.

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What’s even more interesting (or alarming, depending on your point of view) is that you can’t even optimize grinding Nitain in Warframe. More so than any other resource or item Digital Extremes has introduced, Nitain Extract remains difficult to get and for those actively playing, you’re going to want to jump onto every opportunity to grab it.

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All the different ways to get Nitain Extract in Warframe

There are several different things you could be doing to build up a stack of Nitain Extract, like:

  • Nightwave progression
  • Grineer Ghoul Purge missions
  • Cache farming
  • Boss hunting

We’ll explain each of these methods below, but something to keep in mind is that cache farming, in particular, has egregiously low chances of dropping a single Nitain Extract, making it only marginally useful when you’ve already exhausted other options. All the drop rate information referenced in this guide is sourced from Digital Extremes’ own Warframe drop table repository, so it’s fully up-to-date and relevant.

Exchange Nightwave Offerings

Nightwave progression is likely your best source of Nitain Extract in Warframe. Nightwave is, essentially, Warframe‘s own take on the classic live-service battle pass model, and there’s usually a wide variety of items to spend Nightwave Offerings on.

There’s a whole bundle of 15 Nitain Extract for the price of 5 Offerings up for grabs as an evergreen offering. Gathering Nightwave Offerings is a relatively straightforward task, and though it’s not something you’ll necessarily be able to crank out in minutes, it is a great way to stock up for the future. This is the method we recommend to most players.

Nitain Extract as a reward from Ghoul Purge missions

Ghoul Purge missions are special invasion-type events where players need to deal with entire hordes of effectively undead Grineer on Earth’s Plains of Eidolon. While a Ghoul Purge is active, players can tackle special Ghoul Purge bounties from Konzu offering the rare resource. Indeed, Nitain is one of the possible rewards here, but you only have a 4.72% chance to get one Nitain Extract from a successful Stage 4 bounty completion.

It’s rather time-consuming and relatively difficult, depending on how well-geared up you may or may not be.

Cache farming and other missions

If you thought farming Nitain was difficult when trying to do Ghoul Purge bounties, wait until you hear what the odds are of getting some in run-of-the-mill missions. Notably, it is possible for a single Nitain to drop while playing any of the following missions:

  • Plato, Lua – Exterminate
  • Dakata, Kuva Fortress – Exterminate
  • Carpo, Jupiter – Exterminate
  • Ishtar, Venus – Sabotage
  • Terminus, Mercury – Sabotage
  • Gradivus, Mars – Sabotage
  • Ker, Ceres – Sabotage
  • Thon, Ceres – Sabotage
  • Adrastea, Jupiter – Sabotage
  • Calypso, Saturn – Sabotage
  • Rusalka, Sedna – Sabotage
  • Cypress, Pluto – Sabotage
  • Marduk, Void – Sabotage
  • Stribog, Void – Sabotage

That’s a good amount of variety right there, isn’t it? You might be thinking that you’ll be able to stack up some Nitain just by playing regular Exterminate and Sabotage missions, but this couldn’t be farther from the truth.

None of the missions mentioned above has more than a 2% drop chance for Nitain Extract, and what’s more, you need to look for special Resource Cache items to begin with. Notably, Nitain will not drop as a regular mission completion reward here. Instead, you’ll need to scour each level for its three Resource Caches in hopes of getting that 1/100 Nitain in the first place.

Sometimes, you’ll score Nitain from boss kills

Finally, you could also try your hand at killing one of the two relatively difficult bosses: the Wolf of Saturn Six or the Zealoid Prelate. The odds of getting Nitain aren’t great, either, at just a 5% chance, but they’re better than what you get with Resource Cache offerings.

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Screenshot by Destructoid

Getting Nitain used to be way more problematic

While all of the above may sound like a bit of a pain just to get one more type of shiny resource, the simple truth is that farming Nitain Extract is now way easier than it used to be.

A few years back, the only way to get Nitain – or Alertium, as it is sometimes known – was to keep an extremely close eye on the game’s Alert mission rotation. Nitain Alerts were fairly few and far between, with up to four of them popping up over the course of any given day.

Consider that it takes a whopping 20 Nitain to craft the entire Vauban Prime Warframe, and the fact that the four Alerts could up up at any given time, and it becomes obvious why the system might’ve gotten really annoying rather fast.

Thankfully, Digital Extremes has changed this up while still retaining much of Nitain’s elusive nature and rarity. Granted, hoarding it up is still going to be a pain, but at least it won’t be that big of a pain.


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Image of Filip Galekovic
Filip Galekovic
A lifetime gamer and writer, Filip has successfully made a career out of combining the two just in time for the bot-driven AI revolution to come into its own.