Fortnite Beginner’s Guide – How to Get Started

Fortnite is a fun new survival game from Epic Games that offers players a unique experience. Instead of simply building a base, you’ll need to scavenge for supplies and complete different missions, all while holding off the endless hordes of husks that seem to fall from the sky whenever something bad happens. In this article we’ll address the game’s basic systems, and help you get the hang of everything as you dive into Fortnite to get started for the first time.

This guide covers the base version of Fortnite, but if you’re looking for coverage on the battle royale version, be sure to check out our Fortnite Battle Royale guide instead!

How to Scavenge Building Supplies

Scavenging is one of your primary goals in Fortnite, and if you want to make it anywhere in the game, you’re going to need to get used to keeping your supplies backpack filled with items like Stone, Metal, and Wood. These are the basic building blocks you’ll use to build up structures like walls and floors, and you’ll need to have plenty of them on you at all times—trust us.

You can easily scavenge Wood from trees and other wooden things like logs, and even some wooden structures. If you want Metal, we’d suggest hitting up some pipes or even cars. You can also find stashes of Metal ore in caves on more forest-based missions, so be sure to look around for ways to go deeper into the map. You’ll find more metal in city-based missions, where you can find cars, and even metal poles to break down. The best way to get Stone is to look around for large rocks that you can hit with your Pickaxe. These are often found in every map, but they are most abundant in maps that take place in the forests, or on the outskirts of the city.

How to Upgrade Schematics

Schematics are your main way of getting new weapons, and these items can be obtained by finding chests during missions, or by busting open Llamas in the Loot tab on the main menu. Right from the start it can be tempting to upgrade your Schematics once you have the experience available for it, but you should definitely wait before you start upgrading these items.

See, when you upgrade a Schematic, not only do you make the base power of the weapon stronger, but you also make it cost more crafting materials. Sometimes, if you upgrade a Schematic too far, you won’t be able to actually get those schematics until you reach a later point in the game. This makes the Schematic useless to you (until you reach that point later in the game) and you’ll want to avoid this at all times.

Weapons Break, Build New Ones

One of the most interesting choices that Epic Games has made with Fortnite is the Durability feature. Basically, each weapon that you use has a specific Durability, and once this Durability runs out, the weapon breaks and another is equipped. This means you’ll want to constantly be on the lookout for Toolboxes and other objects that you can search, as you’ll need to be able to build new weapons from your Schematics when you need them. Of course, you shouldn’t overstock your weapons, though, or hoard items you find in the wild, as you have a very limited amount of space in your inventory.

You can keep an eye on your weapon’s Durability by checking the line on the right of its icon. This line starts at the top, and slowly wears down as you use the weapon more and more. Most weapons have a pretty good amount of Durability, but lower tier Heavy Weapons (like the RPG) have a much smaller amount of Durability. The kicker here, though, is they have unlimited ammunition, so you won’t have to waste resources crafting ammo for them.

Being a new player in Fortnite can be stressful, especially if you don’t know how to use the game’s basic systems. If you keep all of the information we’ve shared above in mind, then you should be well on your way to mastering the basics and moving on to the more advanced parts of the game’s infrastructure. Be sure to return to our Fortnite guide where you’ll find plenty of other helpful articles like how to get new heroes, and even how to increase your power level.