I just tried this game today and had no clue what the fuck I was doing. I found a planet to play and I just randomly ran around with a few people until we were done. Confusing, but I like the gameplay. It's clunky in a good way.
What are the cards you can use fusion and shit on in the menus? Looks like a relevant system, but I had no idea what do to in the menu.
Heh, you're me two weeks ago. It's tough to figure things out at first because everyone just rushes so fast through the levels for some reason.
Basically just go through the Mercury planet and do the Laire mission a bunch of times to get resources and mods and level up. Then move on to Venus and so forth.
The cards are Mods. You apply those to your warframe, your primary weapon, your secondary weapon, and your melee weapon, and eventually your Sentinel as well.
Fusion is a way to 'rank' up your mods, or make them more potent. So like a +10% bonus would turn into a +15% bonus for instances. The Transmutation thing seems to be not worth it, basically you put 4 mod cards you have and then click the button and you get 1 new mod card out of it. Seems too expensive and I never really got anything worth while out of doing that. Maybe people a bit more familiar with the game can say otherwise.
To apply the mods to your weapons and warframe go to your arsenal and click the triangle button which is labeled as upgrade for a weapon or warframe. Starting off you might want to do the auto apply which is done by pushing L3 and then scrolling over to the right one option to where it says auto.
Always make sure to press the Triangle button when you are done changing up your mods though. Triangle is the apply button and if you just press circle to back out of the screen it won't save your changes. Dunno if that was just me but I missed that at first a bunch of times and always wondered why each time I went into the upgrade screen my previous changes weren't still there. Gotta apply your changes.
I play during the evenings on weekdays if you ever want to party up and have someone to go through the levels with at a more learning pace. PSN is Hoodbury. My problem with learning the game at the start was everyone rushes so fast so it took awhile to figure things out on my own.