Warframe’s The Teacher Has Teshin Strip Your Powers to Teach Modding
Warframe’s latest update adds a mushroom-themed expansion called the Vallis Undermind and a new quest named “The Teacher”, which aims to teach new players how to use the game’s mod system. The quest was made in collaboration between Digital Extremes (narrative) and Sumo Digital (mission design), and it uses a Teshin encounter to force players to engage with modding mechanics in a short, guided scenario.
- What is “The Teacher”?
- How the quest teaches modding
- Development and collaboration details
- Warframe’s early-game onboarding
- Video reference
What is “The Teacher”?
“The Teacher” is a new quest added early in Warframe for new players. In the mission, the player is asked to retrieve a segment for their spaceship but is interrupted by a powerful warrior, Teshin, who removes the player’s abilities and melee weapons. As a result, players must use the mod system to progress and complete the objective.
How the quest teaches modding
The mission is designed to show, rather than only tell, how mods affect weapons and Warframes. For example, the quest highlights elemental status effects: it demonstrates Magnetic damage that reduces enemy shields. The designers adjusted a weapon to be a burst-fire weapon to better display proc rates and elemental interactions, so players can see how mods change combat behavior in real time.
Sumo Digital and Digital Extremes added in-game prompts and goals that require players to place mods and observe the results. Early-game pop-ups had attempted to explain modding before, but the new quest forces interaction with the system inside a controlled combat scenario.
Development and collaboration details
The quest was developed collaboratively: Digital Extremes provided the narrative, while Sumo Digital handled mission design. According to principal games designer Sam Baker, the Sumo team included both long-time Warframe players and newcomers. They used outsider playthroughs to note where players struggled in the existing tutorial and used those observations to shape the quest.
“The first thing we did was basically sit behind them and go right play through the tutorial and take prodigious notes on everywhere they fell out,” Baker said.
Lead narrative designer Ryan Mole of Digital Extremes explained the goal in simple terms: “I think it was really important, at the end of the quest, for players to think, ‘Hey, modding is cool. I want to try more of this.’”
Warframe’s early-game onboarding
Warframe is a complex game with systems that scale over time. The game has been updated over the years to streamline early progression, and earlier updates this year reduced some early grind so players could reach story content faster. However, modding remained an area where many new players did not get clear guidance.
Sumo Digital found that previous tutorial pop-ups did not always register: “Some people didn’t see basic instructions where it’s flashing on the screen saying put the mod in the slot,” he said. As a result, the team built this short, roughly 15-minute mission that intentionally exposes players to mod placement and the way elemental procs work.
“There’s lots of little tweaks and little subtle things in the background there to just sort of show you what it can do rather than tell you,” Baker said. “We had to change the weapon to be a burst-fire weapon, because it shows off the proc rate more,” Baker said. “But you don’t want to […] say to people, ‘oh yeah, actually on a base level mod, you only got a few percentage chance to proc an elemental effect.’ So how do you tutorialize that without changing it?”
Baker also noted the amount of work required: “There’s so much that goes into just making a really simple mission that — honestly — you can blast through in about 15 minutes,” he said. “But it’s months and months of work for loads of people.”
Video reference
Additional context: the Vallis Undermind expansion includes a new mushroom-themed Warframe, an explorable fungal area, and the teaching-focused quest. According to the team, this quest is aimed at closing a longstanding onboarding gap for new players so they see how modding works without relying solely on menu prompts.
“I love Teshin,” Baker said. “He’s my 8-year-old internal self’s idea of what’s cool.”
