Fortnite: Our 27 Best Tips For Scoring Victory Royale
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Pick Your Landing Zone And Avoid Other Players
Check your map at the outset and watch the flight path carefully: Where you land is your first big decision in Fortnite, and it can help you get off to a fighting start.
Your first order of business is finding weapons. Weapons are mostly found inside buildings, so pick a drop location with a few structures, but try to avoid major settlements or towns along the flight path early on if you're new to the game. Those places have great gear, but also attract a ton of players.
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Speed Is Key Early On
If you're confident in your fighting abilities, meanwhile, pick a spot with lots of buildings, and dive straight for it. Hit the ground ASAP: Avoid falling over hills and other high-elevation areas, as these will cause your glider to auto-deploy sooner and keep you in the air longer. Instead, dive toward lower-elevation spots like water or canyons. The sooner you land, the sooner you can scavenge for a weapon.
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Use Headphones
Sound is crucial in Fortnite. You'll use it to catch people sneaking up on you, zero in on enemies who are shooting at you, and track players for ambushes. You're at a disadvantage listening to the game over your computer speakers, TV speakers, or even a sound system, when compared to players who are armed with a quality pair of surround-sound headphones.
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Chop Down Trees For More Wood
Where you get your materials matters. The best place to get wood is trees -- some dispense more than 40 units from a single node. That's more than you can get breaking up boxes and buildings. You'll want about 300 units to start.
Similarly, while brick walls yield some materials, piles of brick-yielding rocks in the wilderness are even better. And while you can get a good haul of metal from destroying vehicles, be careful: If you set off its alarm, other players will be alerted to your position.
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Aiming Matters When Gathering Resources
Whenever you start hammering away at a wall, tree, or pile of rocks to gather resources, you'll notice that a weird blue icon appears on the thing you're smacking. You want to move your crosshair over each new blue icon with every new swing of your pickaxe. This earns you the most resources you can get with each hit, which means you'll grab more building materials and leave yourself less vulnerable.
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Shield Potions Are Essential
Blue shield potions make you more resilient to incoming fire, and they make a world of difference in any given firefight. As you loot in Fortnite, always drink shield potions right away to fire up a shield immediately, and stockpile the potions that you can't use immediately. They're worth carrying around: Your character can drink a small shield potion in about two seconds, which is just fast enough to get you back on your feet as you duck around a corner or build a few quick walls to escape from an enemy.
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Go For The Gold (Weapons)
Weapons come in several varieties and rarities. The good stuff is blue (rare), purple (epic), and orange (legendary). The best stuff -- the most accurate and powerful guns with the most useful add-ons -- are gold (mythic). Don't be afraid to drop a white or green weapon to make room for something better.
You'll find these rarer guns in treasure chests, which are often hidden inside buildings behind walls that you'll have to destroy or in attics you'll need to build stairs to reach.
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Double Up Your Guns For Added Damage
Having two of the same weapon can actually be pretty useful, particularly when it comes to the pump shotgun and the bolt-action sniper rifle. By having two of these guns in adjacent inventory slots, you can avoid the wait between shotgun pumps or sniper reloads, and instead just switch to your second version of the gun to fire a second shot immediately.
The quick switch can be tough to get used to, but with the power that this move affords you, it's worth training yourself to switch rather than wait to reload. It's a great way to maximize your lethality.
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Crouch And Shoot
A lot of guns in Fortnite lack accuracy, especially at close range. Whenever possible to do so safely, keep still and crouch: It'll increase your accuracy, helping you take down other players more quickly.
That doesn't mean you should stop dodging and stand still in the open during a heated battle. But if you spot someone on the move and are thinking about opening fire on them, you'll have an advantage if you get low and keep still.
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Keep Quiet
Running is a noisy way to move around, and sprinting is even louder. You can reduce your movement sounds by crouching and moving more slowly, but note that even rotating your character creates the sound of footsteps. Doors also make a ton of racket, but in Fortnite, you'll often find it's possible to jump through a window and avoid doors entirely. You'll also want to avoid shooting unless absolutely necessary, as the sound is like raising a flag on your location--although silenced weapons help with that issue a great deal.
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Throw Up Walls To Protect Downed Teammates
Creating a few quick fortifications can buy you precious extra seconds while you heal a teammate who has been knocked down by gunfire. Just remember to use wood if you're currently under fire: It'll build the fastest, and it can take the most punishment from other players immediately after being deployed. If you're in a rough battle situation, though, you might need multiple layers (or you might just need to leave your friend hanging while you take out the attackers).
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Take (Or Build) The High Ground
High ground will win you fights in Fortnite. In firefights, practice quickly building upward as you fight enemies. You can drop walls and then ramps to protect yourself as you climb, and shooting down on other players nets you more headshots and damage, while offering you better protection. Quickly making a ramp surrounded by protective walls means that you can jump up and take potshots at enemies below while also making yourself extremely tough to hit.
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Watch For Player Buildings
The good news is that player buildings are usually square, blank, obvious towers... so you'll usually see them from a distance. They're great indicators of where players are staked out, so if you ever spot a tower or other fortification, you should absolutely approach it with caution--it usually means someone's waiting with a scoped rifle, hoping to take down passersby.
If you can destroy the bottom of stairs or the supports of a tower, you might be able to collapse it altogether, so pay attention to how you can use the environment and the construction to your advantage.
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Use Bushes And Trees For Concealment
While many bushes are solid, you can slip inside some of them, which mostly conceals your character and make you tough to spot at a distance. Stealth can take you a long way if you're patient and don't move too much when sneaking up on people.
By the same token, don't ignore those light green bushes around you. Putting a shot or two into a bush will quickly reveal if anyone is hiding in it.
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Never Trust Cover
No cover in Fortnite is foolproof -- pretty much everything is destructible. This means that even when you're hiding out or grabbing cover in a firefight, you should always be prepared to move, strafe, run, and otherwise do your best to avoid fire. Walls won't save you--and especially late in the game, the likelihood of someone bringing along a rocket launcher or mini-gun to a battle increases tremendously.
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Build To Save Yourself From Falling
Fall damage is a big deal in Fortnite. Always remember that you can save yourself by using the build menu to quickly drop structures beneath you as you fall. So long as you're close enough to the wall of a tower or a cliff, you can instantly build a floor or ramp beneath you that can stop your descent and save you from certain doom.
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Be Careful When Looting Defeated Players
Instead of rushing up to a dead player and looting gear (which can leave you very vulnerable), it's often better to take a beat, grab cover, and survey the situation. Other players might be attracted to the gunfire or spot the loot as you're on your way to grab it, allowing them to get the drop on you. Similarly, you might be able to use the dead player's loot to get the drop on them.
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Open Doors (Usually) Mean A Place Has Been Looted
Doors can tell you a lot. An open door on a building might mean someone's inside, though more often, it means that someone has at least been through that building and taken all the good stuff already. By the same token, closing doors behind you is a good way to throw off other players, or to catch the unwary in ambushes.
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Don't Fight Unless You're (Pretty) Sure You Can Win
Your greatest advantage at all times is surprise, but you only have one life to live. This means that it's often better to ignore another player and stay hidden (if you can't get the jump on them).
Take your time, line up your shots, and make sure your opponent is within range so that you take them down before they can react.
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Beware Of Traps
Traps are great for ruining the day of someone following you, or to place on your towers to dissuade anyone sneaking up below you. When heading into buildings, it's good practice to stand beside the front door and look inside to check for an ambush. When you do that, take a glance upward too, to ensure you're not about to stumble into somebody else's devilish plan.
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The Boogie Bomb Is The Best
The goofiest weapon in Fortnite is as useful as it is hilarious. When the Boogie Bomb explodes, everyone caught in its radius is forced to start dancing for five seconds, leaving them completely vulnerable. It's especially handy for when you find a couple of other players already battling it out: With one bomb and a quick trigger finger, you can humiliate your opponents, eliminate them, and steal all their stuff.
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Wood (Often) Trumps Metal
Materials in Fortnite have a few little quirks. Generally, wood is the weakest material, while brick is a little stronger, and metal is the strongest. That said, brick and metal structures take longer to build (and reach full health) than wood structures do. A fresh wood wall can survive two close-range shotgun blasts while brick or metal will collapse after a single blast.
Use wood for firefights. Save your brick and metal for stronger fortifications closer to the end of a match.
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Getting Good At Building Is How You Win
The best Fortnite players are expert builders. They've trained themselves through repetition to quickly construct walls, towers, bridges, and ramps in order to save their lives in the heat of battle, or give themselves a ridiculous advantage using height and cover.
If you play Fortnite like you play PUBG, you'll get shut down over and over by players who love carpentry. Get good at farming resources quickly and erecting structures even faster, if you want to be competitive!
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Watch For (And Mark) Supply Drops
Like just about everything else in Fortnite, supply crates are destructible, and you can damage their balloons from afar with your gun. Doing so causes the crate's health bar to pop up, which stays on your screen even if structures or other things obstruct your line of sight to the crate itself. Marking crates means that you can more easily get to them when they hit the ground, but be ready to fight anyone else with the same idea.
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Use The Storm To Your Advantage
The ever-advancing storm that shrinks the play area is deadly ... but not immediately so. You can sometimes use this tactically: The edge of the storm is a great place to catch desperate players as they scramble to safety. You can also duck through the semi-opaque edge early in the match to hide from players in the eye who are battling you (though that's a risky gamble).
In the end game, keep your back close to the storm. It'll ensure that you won't be attacked from behind.
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Keep Your Inventory Organized
You definitely want to spend time getting used to the inventory menu (press up on the directional pad or "I" on a keyboard) and keeping it organized. It's useful for checking your weapons' stats, handing off guns and ammo to your teammates, and for organizing your inventory so guns and specific types of items are always in the same slots. The repetition of knowing where you keep heals or certain guns can make it a lot easier for you to switch in a hurry.
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Complete Daily Challenges To Unlock Cosmetics Faster
Playing Fortnite earns you experience points based on your performance in a match, and each time you earn enough, you level up, which earns you one "Battle Star." After grabbing 10 Battle Stars, you advance to a new "tier," and at certain tiers, you unlock new emotes and other items. It's possible to earn tiers faster by completing Daily Challenges, which are listed on the Lobby screen when you log into Fortnite. Challenges require you to complete special actions, like killing a set number of players with a specific gun. Challenges give you a bunch of experience points and five Battle Stars for completing them, which can help you earn tiers a lot quicker.
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