As the long-awaited New War event approached Warframe, the new Anomaly Shard item was introduced. While they don’t have dozens of uses like other resources, they can take a handful of hours to farm. Anomaly Shards, with their rarity and lack of uses, often confuse players on where to farm them, which we will go over shortly.
How to Get Anomaly Shards in Warframe
Currently, the only way to obtain Anomaly Shards in Warframe is through Railjack Missions. If you do not have a Railjack, you will need to complete the Rising Tide quest first. Thankfully the time to complete the Rising Tide quest has been reduced ever since the beginning of the New War. The parts needed to create your Railjack are built far faster, and each finished part appears to be easier to attain.”
Entering Murex Sentient Ships
Anomaly Shards only drop within the Veil Proxima, the highest-level area for any Railjack mission. A Sentient ship known as a Murex will occupy a Grineer-controlled node for 30 minutes. It will then swap to another section of the Veil Proxima. The Murex ship can be entered at whatever point during the mission.
Entering the Murex sentient ship will provide a bonus objective to kill 20 high-level Sentient enemies. Completing this objective will reward one Anomaly Shard for every player within the mission and only one making it a crawl to farm these quickly. Murex sentient ships will not spawn if the node is afflicted with a Void Storm. Also worth noting, the Murex ships also have hidden walls within the vessel that can only be destroyed with Void damage from your Operator’s primary fire or alternate abilities so look carefully.
Running Railjack Missions More Efficiently
Of course, farming Anomaly Shards means you must complete the primary objective, thus completing the full mission. A few ways this can be done faster is if you have rank four Tactical Intrinsics, having this allows you to fast travel back to your ship using your Omni gear. Having the ability to fast travel back to your Railjack is incredibly helpful, especially when doing solo missions.
Railjack missions can also take a long time to complete since they require manipulation within the space station, like exposing a core but requiring someone in the Railjack to shoot the core. Having the ability to fast travel with your Omni tool makes this a little less of a hassle. Ultimately, all Warframe content can be done solo. Yet, I recommend doing Railjack missions to farm anomaly shard in Warframe with at least one other person to speed up this process a lot.
Having a team of highly upgraded AI crewmates can help, but none leave the ship. It’s worth adding that Resource Boosters or other mods that boost drop chance like Smeeta Kavat’s Charm mod do affect the number of shard drops with a 28% chance. This mod comes with raising a Smeeta Kavat, so there’s no additional work needed to obtain this mod.
Necramechs Can be Very Helpful to Farm Anomaly Shards Warframe
If you also have level five Tactical Intrinsics, you can deploy your Necramechs into all Railjack missions. If you don’t have a Necramech, it is highly recommended to get one. Necramechs can be obtained and built from obtaining Standing on Deimos from the Entrati Family and primarily from leveling Lloid’s Necraloid Standing.
The parts and blueprints can be obtained from Isolation Vaults and bought from Necroloid. You also need to have a Necramech in order to finish the New War questline. Corpus nodes are far easier once you have one attained.
What Warframes are Good for Railjack Missions?
It’s worth mentioning that a handful of Warframes can make a Railjack mission go faster. Most notably, Protea is the best Warframe to pilot a Railjack. Protea’s Dispensary constantly gives out Ammo, Health, and Energy, which not only provide your Warframes energy, but also indirectly fund the energy of your Railjack since they are treated as the same energy.
There are no energy pickups in space; thus, an unlimited energy supply makes ship battles faster. Since Protea’s energy dispenser is subsumable to the Helminth, this ability can be given to any Warframe of your choice. Loki, Octavia, Ash, and Ivara are good for quickly infiltrating space stations with stealth abilities to hack consoles undisturbed.
Excalibur Umbra excels at destroying Sentients in the Murex ships due to having the unique ability to remove resistances from Sentients with one of his Radial Howl.
What are Anomaly Shards in Warframe Used For?
Currently, these shards don’t have very much use in Warframe for time spent farming mission after mission. Each of Caliban’s Components requires three Anomaly Shards each to build him. Besides needing Anomaly Shards to make Caliban, you will also need dozens of Narmer Isoplasts. Caliban’s signature weapon Venato requires five Anomaly Shards to build.
Lastly, Anomaly Shards can be traded with Little Duck, located in the Backroom in Fortuna. She has a separate store for Anomaly shards which offers the Tenebrous Ephemera for 15 shards or Sentient Anomaly Captura scenes for ten each.
Conclusion
Sadly, anomaly shards in Warframe are rough to farm for and have few rewards. The only reason you would want to farm these in the first place is to obtain Caliban, his weapon, or one Ephemera.
It would be a good idea for Digital Extremes to potentially find more uses for this resource, or at least make it able to be converted into other resources. It has very little function outside of the grind.