Forma, Capacity & Upgrading
Capacity
When you first get a weapon you will notice that your weapon or warframe's capacity(noted in the top left of your upgrade screen) will be extremely limited. Your starting capacity is based on your Mastery Rank and since you are presumably new to this game it will be 0. Placing a mod on your weapon or warframe will consume a set amount of capacity. Since my Mastery Rank at the time is 18 you will see in the image below my Cronus has 18 capacity.
Now that we have established your capacity you are probably wondering how to increase it so you can fit more mods on. Well, this is rather quite simple, we can increase the capacity in two ways. The first way is to rank up your weapon or frame and as it ranks up it will gain 1 capacity per level to a max rank and capacity of 30. The second way will double your capacity to a max of 60 and you will gain 2 capacity per rank as opposed to 1. To do this we will need to put on an orokin catalyst(for weapons) or an orokin reactor(for warframes) by clicking on the actions button at the bottom of the screen and hitting the install reactor/catalyst button. Once we do it should look something like this.
Catalysts is blue and reactors are yellow.
Catalysts is blue and reactors are yellow.
You will see down below my Braton Prime now has 36 capacity to start with instead of 18 like my cronus did.
Now that we have increased our capacity lets rank up to 30!
Now that we have increased our capacity lets rank up to 30!
Forma
Once your weapon reaches the max rank like the Braton Prime below.
You can proceed to add what is known as forma. You can get forma from opening up relics the same way as if you were trying to get some prime gear. A forma is something that will allow you to add a symbol to a mod slot like the v or check mark looking one on from our cronus. This is known as Polarizing. Polarizing is something youw ant to do because if your mod you place there has a matching sign(top right corner of mods) then it will become green and only consume half the amount of capacity. To add a forma or "polarize" you will need to go to your actions button just like when you added a catalyst/reactor only this time we will click the forma button and select a polarity.
To select a polarity just click in the mod slot and it will cycle through.
To select a polarity just click in the mod slot and it will cycle through.
As you see we have now successfully add 1 forma to our weapon/frame. This is great because as we said earlier this will allow a mod with the matching polarity to become green and take up only half the capacity like the serration mod below.
Now depending on your desired mod load out and weapon/frame itself you may need to add more or less than one forma. Nonetheless once you have begun adding some forma into your item it will begin to look something like this.
You can tell how much forma you have put into it by looking at the number beside your rank circled here.
Upgrading Mods
Now that you have started modding I'm sure you are wondering how to rank up your mods themselves to make them more powerful. To do this we are going to need a resource called endo that will drop in all missions as you play.
You can see how much you have and use your endo to rank up your mods be walking over to your mods section on your liset. Once there you will select the mod you want to rank up and click on fusion.
After doing so you will be presented with the screen you see below. Just click the + button under the mod to rank it up at which point you will notice on the left the amount of capacity it will need will increase and high on the right you'll see how much endo you have in addition to a number of credits and endo the rank up will cost you. If you have enough there will be a green check mark and you just need to hit apply fusion to complete the upgrade. Once a mod is upgraded it can not be downgraded.