the General Warframe Info post has a lot of great links for information for Warframe. Below are some points to get you started without spending a day in the Wiki.
OTG’s Warframe starters guide
- How do I progress
Progression is measured in two ways, Master Rank (MR), Quest Completion, and Map Unlocks;
Mastery Rank is gained by leveling warframes, weapons, companions, and archwing up to level 30, as well as quest completion and zone/planet unlocks. MR will unlock the ability to use some weapons, and mods. It will also increase your daily caps on things such as focus, syndicate factions, initial capacity available for warframes and weapons, loadout save slots, and maybe one or two other minor things I forgot. MR does not restrict you from grouping with other players, so MR 1 can group with MR 24 and have no penalties. When you receive enough exp to advance to your next MR you will need to go to a relay to take the MR test, this is located in Cephalon Simaris’ room. It is highly recommended that you practice the test before attempting to pass it, since you can only make one attempt every 24 hours. That being said, if you fail to pass you are not losing out on exp, it isn’t visible, but you are still gaining exp toward the next MR. (I was almost MR 14 by the time I passed the MR 13 test).
Quest Completion gates access to some content. If you look at your codex in your Orbiter there is a quest tab that will show you your progress through the quests, as well as what the prerequisites are. These quests are the only thing gating content in the game, so the sooner you get through these the more access you will have to everything that is available in Warframe.
Map Unlocks will give you MR exp, as well as open up the Planetary Junctions. These junctions are prerequisites for several quests as well as will give you weapon schematics. Additionally in order to access a map you will need to have visited the zone prior to it. For example, on Venus you can not dop the assassination at Fossa until you have unlocked Aphrodite. The exception to this is that if you are grouped with someone else that has already unlocked the content they can drag you along with them. Unlocking all of the zones on a given planet will allow you to use extractors on that planet to gain some passive resources.
- Where to get new weapons
The Market will have a lot of weapons available. If you visit the market terminal in your Orbiter you can filter to show blueprints only, this will prevent you from accidentally spending Platinum (real $ equivalent). These blueprints are craftable in your foundry on your Orbiter.
Additionally weapon blueprints will be rewarded from completing the planet junction unlocks, purchased from Syndicates, purchased within the Dojo, and crafted on Cetus. The weapons from the Marketplace are usually cheaper and easier to craft when you are starting out though.
Note that there are a couple weapons you can buy flat out for credits, these are the MK-1 and other starter weapons. You will want to purchase these and level them as soon as possible os you can get rid of them, they suck, but are worth exp for your MR.
- Where to get new Warframes
Warframe components will initially come from assassination zones, like Fossa on Venus. Additionally there are several warframes that you gain access to via quests, and that can be purchased in the clan Dojo.
- What to spend plat on, and how to get it.
Platinum is Warframe’s real $ equivalent. There are two ways to get it, buy it, or trade for it. Most trades in game will be platinum for an item (mod, prime part, etc), so if you have extra prime parts or certain mods you could hang out in the trade channel and sell them for plat to other players. That being said, trades don’t have to be for plat, sometimes people will arrange a part A for part B, but most people prefer to use plat as their unit of measure. Additionally you can spend real money to purchase plat from DE. There are a couple things that make the purchase from DE better. As a daily login item you can sometimes receive coupons for 50 and 75% off plat purchases. Also rather than just purchasing plat on its own they will have prime bundles, which include a prime warframe, some weapons etc, and plat. Steam will also have starter bundles occasionally that make it more cost effective than the standard cost, assuming you can wait.
When you do have platinum the number one recommended use for it is to buy inventory slots. There are 30+ warframes, and hundreds of weapons, not to mention sentinels, archwing, riven, and probably a couple other slot types. Now that isn’t to say that you NEED to purchase hundreds of slots, though you might decide you want to. But you will likely find at least a dozen warframes that you like to use, and several dozen weapons to switch between. Once you start getting prime variants of the warframes you will not want to get rid of them since they can be harder to obtain than their normal variants. Inventory slots are the only non-cosmetic item in Warframe that is only available with platinum, hence the emphasis. IF you have platinum burning a hole in your pocket and you want to supplement your start in Warframe, Mesa, and Chroma are the two warframes that are the hardest to farm in game.