Warframe 1999 Beginner Guide: Requirements, Hex Syndicate & Höllvania Roadmap

If you dropped Warframe a year ago and the 1999 trailer dragged you back in, you're not alone. I came back after an 8-month break and spent the first two hours just figuring out what I needed to have unlocked before I could even start the quest. Here's everything I wish I knew on day one.

Prerequisites: What You Actually Need

MR8 is the hard minimum, but honestly if you're below MR12 you're going to struggle with the combat sections. The quest requires completion of all main story quests up through The Duviri Paradox. That means The Second Dream, The War Within, The Sacrifice, The New War, Angels of the Zariman, and Duviri. Yes, all of them. The 1999 story heavily references events from across the entire saga.

You also need a Railjack. Not for the quest itself — the main story is ground-based — but several post-quest farming nodes are Railjack-adjacent. If your Railjack is still stock with no mods, spend an afternoon upgrading it before you jump into 1999 content. A basic hull and shield mod plus some AI crew members from Ticker in Fortuna will save you a lot of frustration.

Necramech is the other soft requirement. You technically don't pilot one during the Hex questline, but the Technocyte Coda adversary system and some of the higher-level bounties will throw you into situations where having a leveled Necramech makes a real difference. If you skipped the Isolation Vault grind on Deimos, now's the time.

One thing nobody tells you: stock up on Void Traces before you start. You'll need 100 per Radiant relic refinement when farming Cyte-09 parts, and the new relic types drop specifically from 1999 mission nodes. Having a stash of 500+ traces going in means you can start refining immediately instead of farming traces and relics separately.

Accessing The Hex Quest

Once you've checked all the prerequisite boxes, the quest appears in your Codex as "The Hex." Click it and you're off to 1999.

Don't expect the usual 30-minute story mission. The Hex questline is a multi-hour narrative with full voice acting, branching dialogue, and actual character development for the NPCs. It's closer to a single-player RPG chapter than a typical Warframe quest. I'd recommend blocking out an evening for it rather than trying to squeeze it in between sorties.

The quest takes you to Höllvania, a city-state that feels like someone dropped a Warframe tileset into a 1990s Eastern European city. Neon signs, rain-slicked streets, techno music bleeding out of clubs, and a whole lot of Infested gore. The atmosphere is genuinely excellent. Digital Extremes' art team outdid themselves.

The Hex: Meet the Crew

The centerpiece of the 1999 update is The Hex syndicate — six Protoframes, each with distinct personalities, voice acting, and personal story arcs:

Arthur Nightingale is the Excalibur Protoframe and de facto leader. Stoic, burdened, and clearly the protagonist type. His bounties focus on direct combat and elimination objectives.

Aoi is the Mag Protoframe. She's got this dry, sarcastic humor that caught me off guard. Her bounties lean toward defense and support — protecting objectives, escort missions, that kind of thing.

Lettie is Trinity Protoframe and the team medic. Calm under pressure. Her missions involve rescue and recovery objectives. She's also the one who explains most of the Techrot biology lore.

Amir is Volt Protoframe. High energy, talks fast, always in motion. His bounties are speed-focused — captures, sabotage, anything where getting in and out fast matters.

Quincy is Nyx Protoframe. Mysterious, says less than the others but every line counts. Her missions involve infiltration and psychic warfare themes.

Eleanor is the sixth member — I won't spoil her deal here, but let's say her introduction is a highlight of the quest.

Each Hex member has a Chemistry meter that rises through bounty completion, dialogue choices in the KIM messenger, and gifts you can give them. More on that in the Chemistry guide.

The Höllvania Hub

After completing certain quest milestones, Höllvania becomes your home base for 1999 content. It's a subway station turned resistance hideout.

The hub has several stations you'll want to locate early:

• The bounty board where you pick up Hex missions

• The KIM terminal for chatting with Hex members

• The Atomicycle garage for summoning and customizing your bike

• A mods/workbench station (yes, you can mod and craft here)

• The navigation console for launching 1999 mission nodes

There's also a hidden arcade cabinet that lets you play Caliber Chicks 2, a full-on side-scrolling beat-em-up mini-game co-developed with Sumo Digital. It's surprisingly good. You can earn high scores that unlock cosmetic rewards.

The Atomicycle

You get your first Atomicycle during the quest, and it's a massive upgrade over the K-Drive. It has weight. It has momentum. You can drift around corners and ramp off environmental features. The handling model feels like DE actually played some racing games before building this.

You can customize the livery, handlebars, exhaust, and performance parts through the garage in the hub. Most customization options are earned through Hex bounties or purchased with standing. The base bike is plenty fast for getting around, so don't stress about upgrades early on.

The Atomicycle can be summoned in any open-world zone — Plains of Eidolon, Orb Vallis, Cambion Drift, and Duviri. It's not just a Höllvania gimmick. I've been using mine to speed up Eidolon hunts and it shaves a good 30 seconds off travel time between lures.

What to Farm First

Priority order after the quest:

Cyte-09 components come first. The new Warframe is a stealth sniper with genuinely useful abilities — Seek reveals enemies through walls, Resupply generates ammo and elemental buffs, Evade is a mobility stealth tool, and Neutralize is a massive single-target damage ability. Component blueprints drop from different Hex members' bounty pools, so you'll need to spread your standing gains across the syndicate.

After Cyte-09, work on Hex Chemistry for Gemini Skins. Each Hex member has a corresponding Warframe that gets the Gemini cosmetic — switching between Protoframe human form and full Warframe mid-mission changes animations and voice lines. It's purely cosmetic but the execution is really well done.

Technocyte Coda weapons should be your third priority. Like Kuva and Tenet weapons, these come with innate elemental bonuses and can be Valence Fused to increase the bonus percentage. Some of the Coda weapons have genuinely competitive stats for Steel Path content.