Kuva Siphons are Grineer harvesting machines that can be found in modified non-endless missions on up to two Planets near to which the Kuva Fortress moves in the Star Chart. They can be destroyed to obtain Kuva.
On their own, the Siphons are harmless and cannot be directly damaged by the player's weapons or abilities. Their only function is to gather and store Kuva from the environment by somehow using the energies of Tenno in their vicinity. However they are always accompanied by Kuva Corps reinforcements to defend them, which include Kuva Guardians and Kuva Jesters.
Kuva Siphon missions become accessible only after completing The War Within quest and obtaining Mastery Rank 5. Should they take place on nodes occupied by the Corpus or Infested, players can expect to see combat between the resident faction and the Grineer intruders, serving to distract both.
Harvesting Kuva[]

Kuva cloud.
Kuva siphoning sites can be found in nodes marked with a Kuva icon on the Star Chart. These nodes will only appear on the two planets that are nearest the Kuva Fortress as it moves around the system. Kuva Siphons cannot spawn in the Void.
Up to six Kuva Siphon missions in total can appear on up to two planets, and they rotate by cooldown with completion of each one. Five of these missions will have enemy levels in the 25-35 range granting up to 700 Kuva per successful harvest. The remaining 6th mission will be created as a Kuva Flood mission, which will reward double the amounts of Kuva, but in turn will spawn level 80-100 enemies.
Kuva can be obtained from Kuva Siphons through the following process:
- Find the machine, which will be highlighted by a special Kuva marker (similar to the icon on Kuva mission nodes) when players near its position, along with the rooms near it gaining a reddish-pink hue. Approaching it will trigger a menacing activation horn and begin the siphoning process, followed by transmissions from either the Lotus or the Grineer Worm Queen.
- Wait for the machine to begin attracting a cloud of Kuva. The cloud will make a distinctive shrieking noise as it approaches the Siphon. In addition, one of the machine's four Braids will be raised at this time, and will point towards the incoming cloud, making it easier to locate. As this happens, Kuva Guardians and Jesters, as well as other Kuva Corps Grineer units will teleport in to further secure the machine.
- Locate the red-black cloud of Kuva approaching the machine from somewhere in the room. It can be located by using a Synthesis Scanner, or by following the sinister whistling noise it makes as it moves around the environment.
- Switch to Operator form and either Void Dash through the Kuva cloud or shoot it with your Amp. This will destroy the active Braid.
- Repeat this four times, once for each of the Siphon's Braids. A meter under your minimap will display how many braids you've destroyed.
Once all the Braids are destroyed, the Kuva Siphon will explode and award every member of the Squad around 550-700 Kuva, or around 1,100-1,400 on Kuva Floods. Players will receive the same amount of Kuva regardless of how many clouds the Siphon manages to capture while it was active.
However, if the Siphon manages to absorb 8 clouds of Kuva before it is destroyed (indicated by the row of diamonds under the minimap, which will turn red when the Siphon absorbs a Kuva cloud), it will teleport away, and every member of the Squad will be awarded only up to 350 Kuva depending on the number of braids destroyed. If no braids were destroyed at all there will be no reward. Any remaining Guardians will disappear along with the Siphon whether it is destroyed or successfully escapes, but Jesters and any other Kuva Grineer will stay in mission.
The Kuva Siphon is considered a secondary objective, and failing it will have no effect on the mission's primary objective.
Rewards[]
Players will get an additional mission reward on completion when completing Kuva Siphon missions. Note that players do not need to engage with the Siphon itself in order to earn these rewards.
| Rewards | |
|---|---|
| 50% | |
| 12.5% | |
| 12.5% | |
| 12.5% | |
| 12.5% | |
Locations: See in-game World State Window for active Kuva Siphon nodes, must complete The War Within quest
Drop tables outdated? Readers can update Module:DropTables/data and cross reference with official drop tables on https://www.warframe.com/droptables.
Kuva Floods will guarantee a Requiem Relic drop.
| Rewards | |
|---|---|
| 25% | |
| 25% | |
| 25% | |
| 25% | |
Locations: See in-game World State Window for active Kuva Siphon nodes, must complete The War Within quest
Drop tables outdated? Readers can update Module:DropTables/data and cross reference with official drop tables on https://www.warframe.com/droptables.
Tips[]
- When in a group, killing the Guardians as quickly as possible is imperative to prevent them from interfering in the players' Kuva collection. When playing solo however, it might be best to focus on collecting the Kuva rather than killing the Guardians.
- Bring in crowd control frames to ensure that Operators will be able to survive long enough, since high level Grineer are capable of killing them quickly with their weapons.
- This will help with the inflow of regular enemies, but Guardians are somewhat resistant to abilities, meaning that killing them is still ideal.
- Another alternative is to bring Warframes with high armor and/or health pools to allow them to survive frequent Operator deaths.
- An
Atlas with the
Tectonic Fracture augment can wall off narrow walkways and block enemies, including the Guardians, from reaching the Kuva Siphon. In addition, his
Rumblers, if properly modded, can distract and absorb blows from the Guardians. Using either or both of his abilities will not only allow Operators to safely dispose of the Guardians, but also create a safe space for players to intercept the Kuva clouds.
Frost's
Snow Globe can enhance Operator survivability by preventing ranged enemies from attacking them while inside, and crippling any enemies that enter the globe, making it easier to gather Kuva. Using the
Chilling Globe augment can further increase protection by freezing enemies trying to enter the globe. Kuva Guardians and Kuva itself are not affected by Snow Globe. (Keep in mind, snow globe will block Operator's void dash from entering the globe, crippling the ability to pursue Kuva.)- A range-duration build
Ivara is capable of harvesting Kuva Siphons solo by using her
Quiver's Sleep Arrow for crowd control, and Cloak Arrow to hide Ivara and the Operator from sight, allowing them to more safely gather the Kuva clouds on approach and, if desired, safely engage Kuva Guardians at the same time. - A
Nyx with a good duration and long range
Chaos Sphere can allow players to easily solo most of the missions, as the enemies will become distracted and fight each other and the augment will allow you to cast Chaos less often.
Loki's
Irradiating Disarm can keep the Kuva Guardians busy as they attack fellow Grineers as well as other enemy factions while Loki stays invisible and focus on the Kuva clouds.- Limbo's Rift Plane can be used to ignore all enemies and focus on finding Kuva clouds.
- Keep in mind that the Operator cannot enter the Rift under any circumstances, though Limbo himself will be safe in the Rift while the Operator is out.
- Beware Combas, Scrambuses, and any Nullifier Crewman, as they can forcefully eject Limbo from the Rift Plane.
- Clouds of Kuva can also be marked with a waypoint for greater visibility
- It is possible to invite players to a mission upon discovering a Kuva Siphon in order to more easily farm the Kuva Siphon, provided that the mission's objectives have not been accomplished. Although the Siphon is guaranteed to appear.
- Resource Boosters double the amount of Kuva gained from Kuva Siphon events, allowing more Kuva to be collected.
- Smeeta Kavat's double resource buff from Charm (indicated by a 120s buff with a kavat icon) can also double the amount of Kuva gained from Kuva Siphons. This can be combined with a resource booster to quadruple the amount of Kuva gained. If you're extremely lucky, you can potentially gain this buff a second time while the first buff is still active, resulting in yet another layer of resource bonus. With all three of these bonuses, you can earn in the neighborhood of 10000 Kuva from a single Flood siphon, however the likelihood of doing so is rare.
- A way to efficiently garner a buff from a Smeeta without losing mission time is to gather 3/4 of the Kuva clouds and then go complete the objective (provided it's an objective like Sabotage, Rescue, Spy, etc.), since the Kuva collection pauses if all squad members are at least 200m away from the siphon. If the Smeeta resource buff activates during that time the player can simply run back to the siphon and capture the last cloud with no time lost.
- If players have not encountered the Kuva Siphon prior to reaching the Reactor room in a Reactor Sabotage mission, it is recommended that the Reactor be destroyed by either cryogenic freeze (coolant cell in the fuel port) or magnetic anomaly (fuel cell in the coolant port) methods, in order to reduce the impact of environmental damage to players upon reaching the Siphon.
- A player who has completed the War Within can taxi any other players to a Kuva Siphon mission, and all players will receive Kuva, regardless of whether they have completed the War Within.
Trivia[]
- Multiple inactive Kuva siphons can be seen stationed in a room during Kuva Fortress missions. This room can be commonly found in the Disruption node.
- The Kuva Cloud can be scanned and has its own entry in the Codex, requiring only 3 scans and being listed under the Grineer faction, despite being of Orokin origin.
- Curiously, when scanning the Kuva Cloud, the cloud sports an invisible head that may serve as the actual hitbox for the cloud (though this is speculated) and is located far above the cloud itself. The head becomes visible when using a scanner or through
Investigator via
Helios and
Helios Prime and resembles a Corrupted Lancer's head.
- Curiously, when scanning the Kuva Cloud, the cloud sports an invisible head that may serve as the actual hitbox for the cloud (though this is speculated) and is located far above the cloud itself. The head becomes visible when using a scanner or through
Bugs[]
- Sleep Arrow can open Siphons to finishers, though they will deal no damage.
- Kuva Siphons might randomly stop spawning clouds, preventing players from gathering Kuva.
- When a host migration takes place the entire event will be disrupted and everyone will be unable to harvest Kuva.
- Sometimes a Siphon is spawned too close to walls or multilevel walkways, making intercepting clouds almost impossible, since Kuva clouds can be siphoned through obstacles.
- Kuva Clouds frequently get trapped in the environment, becoming unable to reach the Siphon. They can be intercepted even through obstructions.
- Less of a bug and more of a progression issue, sometimes Siphons can spawn behind locked doors that block progression until the objective is complete. Since some objectives may spawn mission countdown timers (like destroying a Reactor) this makes it difficult as the time allotted might not be enough to also destroy the Siphon.
- Siphons are tied to the actual mission node in real time. This means that if you select a Kuva Siphon mission, but are unable to locate the siphon before the node moves, the siphon will not spawn.
- Using the Amp secondary fire acquired from the Pencha Scaffold freezes Kuva clouds in place, preventing them from being gathered. This causes the siphon braid to remain outstretched and no longer summons new clouds to absorb.
Media[]
Patch History[]
Update 30.9 (2021-11-11)
- Removed the ‘Repeat Mission” button after completing a Kuva Flood mission due to an exploit.
Update 30.5 (2021-07-06)
- Fixed SMAA with Bloom causing black boxes on Kuva Siphon.
Hotfix 29.10.4 (2021-03-23)
- Fixed Kuva Siphons objective UI indication missing from the HUD.
Update 29.10 (2021-03-19)
- Fixed a nonfunctional Kuva Siphon spawning in the Corpus Ship tileset.
- Fixed Kuva Siphon spawning in the floor in the Grineer Settlement tileset.
Hotfix 28.0.1 (2020-06-11)
- Fixed Kuva Siphons clipping into geometry in the Corpus Ship tileset.
Hotfix 27.3.15 (2020-04-17)
- Fixed a script error that could result in the Kuva Siphon not spawning correctly.
Update 27.3 (2020-03-24)
- Fixed Kuva Siphon missions sometimes ceasing to register destruction of the Kuva clouds for the remainder of the mission.
Hotfix 25.4.1 (2019-07-24)
- Fixed a case of Kuva Clouds spawning right beside the Kuva Siphon in the Gas City tileset, resulting in the mission being difficult to complete as the Kuva Cloud gets almost immediately sucked up.
Hotfix 24.2.9 (2019-01-18)
- Fixed clients who already completed a particular Kuva Siphon/Flood mission being able to re-earn the same Kuva reward by joining any Host that hasn't completed said mission yet.
Update 22.0 (2017-10-12)
- Capture missions will no longer have the chance to change to the Exterminate objective in Kuva Siphon missions.
Hotfix 19.6.3 (2017-01-17)
- Fixed no Capture Target spawning in Kuva Siphon missions.
- Fixed incorrect Lotus transmissions during a Kuva Siphon.
Update 19.6 (2017-01-11)
- In an effort to address the issue of people not noticing the movement of The Kuva Fortress, we have made the loop completion time odd rather than a 24 hour cycle. Players who were logging in around the same daily time found that the Kuva Fortress would always be roughly in the same position, and was restricting the variety of Kuva Siphon missions available.
Fixes:
- Fixed Clients not being able to trigger the Kuva Siphon.
- Fixed Host Migrations breaking Kuva Siphon gameplay.
Update 19.1 (2016-11-25)
- Kuva Siphon missions will spawn on any Planet near the ever-moving Kuva Fortress.
- Kuva Siphon missions will have its own selectable mission to enter (exactly like how other multi-mission nodes work). This way once you commit to it, you know exactly what you're going in for and matchmaking will reflect that accordingly.
- There will be 6 Kuva Siphon missions active which will rotate around the planets near the Kuva Fortress with a cool down as you complete each one.
Hotfix 19.0.3 (2016-11-14)
- Kuva Siphons prevented from spawning in Invasions or Void Fissures.
211 comments
Void Blast no longer exists, so you can remove it from step number 4.
Removed, thanks.
False
Please elaborate how that is false.
Just a troll, based off their recent spree of comments. Or needlessly pedantic. I don't know which is worse.
Idk if it's a bug or something that should be mentioned, but after doing a mission, it didn't disappear in my alerts list so I tried doing it again and doing so does not give any Kuva upon completion.
I'd like to take a moment to thank those who maintain the wiki, because without this, I wouldn't be able to look up the mechanics during the mission since DE can't be bothered to add dialogue explaining how it works.
So it's actually 50% of dropping a relic on standart siphons? The more you know...
These missions need the reward to be buffed bad. 600 (or 1200 for flood) is a joke. Should probably be 2000 (or 4000 for flood) just to make them worth doing. Compare this to how fast you can get kuva doing arbitrations or steel path.
If you need a lot of kuva quickly, the best way is Kuva Survival (Taveuni on Kuva Fortress). You gotta bring either a really strong loadout that can quickly wipe large amounts of enemies, or a strong "on kill" type looting frame (Hydroid or Khora, with the former being superior).
You want to inject the catalysts in every single life support tower, so you won't be getting the big 30% boosts from using them for life support. Thus, you need to rely entirely on the RNG dropped modules from enemy kills (hence the requirements I mentioned above).
There is something very wrong with the cloud path textures, it makes my screen black whenever I intercept every cloud path, even if I absorb it really ahead, the path it would make is still bugged until the siphon is fully destroyed, what the actual fuck
This is so fuckin stupid. What an awful thing to be added to the game. How to convey 0 information to the player 101. Why can't they just, I don't know, fucking tell us how to do this instead of having to look it up. Even worse, I saw that these things have apparently been bugged before. Outstanding.
Yall have never played a soulsbourne game and it shows
Dude (different Tenno here but) I have played all the Souls games...none of them require you to spend any amount of time reading up on mechanics. Where as Warframe has a plethora of game modes and missions where you really should look up what to do before you give it a go.
There is just no information, no proper hints, nothing. No amount of "X game did this already" will ever excuse the fact that this objective is badly designed. Hand holding is one thing, but it's just as bad to give zero information.
Complete facts, the first anon is incredibly stupid tbh
Can a longer mission like survival have multiple siphons?
Nope. Each mission only has 1 siphon.
Did anybody else encounter a bug where one player receives Kuva and the other doesn't (assuming you play with two players)?
I seem to be encountering a lot of clueless players lately who want to let the siphon "fill up", as they seem unaware doing this won't give any more kuva than normal.
Perhaps this should be an actual feature? Someone should suggest it on the forums. Spending time to let it "fill up" could increase its rewards. But if you let it capture too many clouds and you then miss a cloud and fail, then you'll get none of the extra rewards. Sort of a risk-reward kind of thing.
Letting it fill up could also reward less Kuva.
Just destroy the damn thing fast and everyone can get to the next mission.
Less rewards? Cringe
are we gonna talk about the scanning floating head in the kuva cloud
Placeholder model for the "Kuva Cloud" object upon which to attach the "Kuva Cloud" particle effect.
Common technique in game design for particle entities meant to be actual game objects is to use an actual physical object as a base to attach all the scripts to for behavior and interaction with the physics and other game objects, then turning invisible and using it as the origin point for the particle effect they wanted in the first place.
Why a head specifically, though? More than likely it was just a handy prefab that happened to be around the same size they needed, though given certain hints and fan-theories about the true nature of Kuva, it could very well be a hint of its own...
Magus Lockdown seems to capture the kuva clouds now. It used to just stun them.
Yep saw that too. At first I thought it might be what causes them to break, but I got one to bug out without using Void Dash.
Is it me or do the kuva missions not give standing.
Standing?
seems like u have inhaled too much Kuva from all that farming
Lmao
You do realize that you can gain standing via the sigils
Not sure what DE did, but now some kuva missions won't give any kuva. Over the years i've seen everything from siphon not spawning, or spawing underground, clouds not spawing or stuck, or spawning 1 meter from the siphon, or not counting when destroyed, missions not refreshing on the map etc... But that one really takes the cake.
ok so what is the cool down time for kuva flood node to reappear?
My experience tells me it's 30 minutes, but it works in bizarre ways sometimes
Sometime completing a Kuva siphon is not rewarding due to Planet's Kuva NOD moved to another location while you are in mission or it's just a bug?!?
Kuva siphon doesn't always spawn on ceres shipyard tilestes? I've checked the entire map multiple times and no luck. This has happened to me and my friends multiple times, is there any way to stop this from happening?
It's not that it doesn't spawn, it's just that in that tyletset they are a pain in the ass to find, I've lost up to 20 minutes in a team of 4 looking for it, luckily we found it but it was still painful
stacked 3 times with Tek-Enhance, got 18.5k https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/550229177337643028/586255163195654144/unknown.png
To ensure that Operators will be able to survive long enough, use Naramon's Surging Dash. Per dash you will get 10 Energy per enemy in 12m Radius. So as long as there are three or more enemies, you can dash and stay in invincible/void mode forever (and if there's less: how could you die?). It also makes attacking the clouds trivial. Just dash in the general direction and if you get within 12 m of the cloud, you'll destroy it.
For total cheese, get the Lockdown arcane, tethering/killing everything with your unlimited void dashes...
I dont get it, so the max amount of kuva you can get for doing a flood mission is 4x1400 or 4x700 ???
4x1400 or so for floods.
5x1400 or even 6x1400 if you're the luckiest person ever