Get Started: LEGO ® Fortnite ® Survival Mode

Playing LEGO® Fortnite® in Survival Mode can be some of the best places in the multiverse to prove how capable and resourceful you are.

Teleported to a strangely familiar world, transformed into a playful LEGO minifigure, your success depends on hard work, creativity and imagination.

But imagination doesn’t fill an empty stomach, give you shelter from a cold storm or protect you from angry wolves. Don’t worry: You’ve got this, and we’ve got you.

In this LEGO Fortnite Survival guide, we’ll show you how to think about the first things you do with a series of helpful hints for your first several hours. You won’t believe how awesome you can be just by taking care of the things around you, starting with your LEGO self.

The Beautiful Challenge of LEGO® Fortnite® Survival

While LEGO Fortnite players have a choice of two modes to play in, crafting survival mode is generally more challenging.

In a LEGO Fortnite Survival world, you have to build, gather, craft, fight enemies and explore. Your life is in your ever-more-capable hands, as you start with literally nothing, harvesting your way to success one stone, tree or branch at a time, learning the skills and crafting the tools to overcome the odds and make it through one more beautiful day.

And you’ll need those skills and tools because, while the intriguing world you create and enter may be beautiful and playful and full of delight, there’s potential danger lurking atop every hill, hiding in every copse of trees and burrowed underground, disguised as a cute little plant and lurking in every cave. When the sun goes down and the moon comes up, the temperature drops and you get cold enough to make it hurt. Skeletons rise from the ground, and your very presence annoys them enough to attack you on sight. There’s nothing humorous about them!

You’ll need to gather wood and refine that wood to build swords and shields and defend yourself. You’ll need to build machines to make the raw wood more useful. The more you build, the more you learn and the more Blueprints you unlock to build ever bigger, better things.

And what you do matters to you more than anyone, because it’s your world, and it’s your story. LEGO Fortnite’s worlds are procedurally generated, which means that the world you create is unique and personalized, and while there are some commonalities in every world, nobody else’s is exactly like yours.

In LEGO Fortnite, you create your world, and you create your own story within that world.

It’s all about choice. You can pet a cow and get its milk or you can eliminate the bovine LEGO creature and harvest the meat. It’s your world shaped by your decisions.

Each world is filled with mysteries to discover, scattered throughout exciting biomes like pastoral Grasslands, the deserts of Dry Valley, and the frigid Frostlands. Explore those areas, and you discover friendly (and unfriendly!) inhabitants and animals like adorable wooly sheep and grazing cows.

Fortnite veterans will recognize the rocks, the trees, the grass that sways in the wind, and that’s because the LEGO Fortnite is set in the natural world of Fortnite. Yet despite its familiarity, LEGO Fortnite’s world isn’t the same as the one you’ll find in Battle Royale. LEGO bricks and elements are everywhere, just beneath the surface. Chop down a tree, and it’s bundles of LEGO wood elements that you see fly out. And some of them aren’t even below the surface. The cows and sheep that peacefully wander the Grasslands grazing on the Fortnite-style grass are made up of little LEGO bricks and elements, too. It all works together!

But when you get down to the business of interacting with the world, LEGO Fortnite’s inhabitants – including many familiar faces from the cast of Fortnite like the adorably pink Cuddle Team Leader and the fiercely blue-and-pink Brite Bomber – as well as building materials and wildlife are made of LEGO bricks, elements and minifigures. Even Fortnite Outfits – the cosmetics that players wear in-game – magically transform from Fortnite Style into LEGO brick Style.

Your First Day

There you are, in the middle of a beautiful Fortnite-inspired world. A snow-capped mountain beckons in the distance. Grass sways in the wind. Pumpkins and raspberries grow around the bushes and trees that stretch as far as you can see.

You have … nothing. Literally nothing. Not even a clue about where you are.

Now what?

Your First Trek

You can arrive anywhere in the world that you create, from bucolic grasslands or frigid tundras, but you don’t have to stay where you land. And you probably shouldn’t.

Look at your surroundings. Are there bushes, trees and rocks nearby? If not, then move to an area where these things are in abundance. They’re going to be among the most important items you use in your first few hours.

Also, think about whether you’re in a good place to settle. Would you start a village there? Does it offer natural protection? Those considerations are important, too.

Now go foraging for resources. Pick up wood and rocks from the ground. Those are easy. Find some bushes and meager trees nearby, punch them, and collect the resources that pop out.

This is galactically important and a crucial part of the game’s loop. You’re gathering resources in your backpack, and now you get to use those resources to make awesome things and help yourself.

Your First Food

In the upper left corner of your screen, you’ll see a bunch of little segments arranged in a circle. That tells you how hungry you are right now. If you get hungry enough you’ll take damage, and those little hearts up in the top left will start to empty just like they would if an enemy punched you.

LEGO Fortnite’s world provides for you. Your job is to find and eat the food that you can find growing around. And pay particular attention when you’re eating, too. Some food takes longer to eat than others, and some food fills you up more than others, too. Some food even has special powers.

Your First Fire

The sun is making its way through the sky as you work, and the cold, dark night is approaching. It’s time to put the resources you’ve gathered to use.

You got the Campfire blueprint when you collected wood, so use it in an area that seems like a nice and safe place to settle. Open your Builds menu, and select the campfire. Now choose a place to put it, and build it. It’s the easiest and least-complicated kind of item to create. Within a second, you’ll have a source of heat to keep you warm at night. Look at you, surviving!

Your First Shack

After you build your campfire, you’ll receive the Simple Shack blueprint. That’s exactly what you need for those cold and rainy nights. But building a house – even a little one – is more complicated than building a campfire, and it’s time to learn how building works.

Building is one of the best things to do in LEGO Fortnite, complete with the clicky satisfaction that you get from snapping real-world LEGO bricks and elements together. It’s easy. You pick something to build, choose a place to put it, and then you begin the building process.

Don’t worry: You don’t have to build it brick-by-brick. LEGO Fortnite smartly packages pieces together to give you the satisfaction of craftsmanship.

Every piece you place requires a resource, which is why we spent so much time gathering so many resources earlier. Still, you may need to make a trip for some wood or other elements.

Then it’s just a matter of choosing a location (close to your campfire makes sense), selecting the piece that you want to place and building your new home piece-by-piece. Just point your cursor at the silhouette that matches the piece that you selected, press a button or key, and your floors, walls and ceilings click into place.

Your First Bed

Even better, every time you build and place those pieces, you also gain access to their individual parts. They’re available in your Build menu for the rest of the game.

You’ll unlock the Bed blueprint after you finish building your house. Head to your Simple Shack, and build a place to sleep with the Bed blueprint.

Now rest up.

After you crawl into your bed, you’ll see that any health you’re missing will fill up. What you won’t find is a way to fast-forward and sleep through the night. LEGO Fortnite Survival worlds require more from you, even when it’s dark and cold and scary.

Resting has one more benefit: If you run out of health, you’ll respawn in the (relative) comfort and safety of your house and bonfire.

Your First Night

OK. You lit a campfire, and you built a house and a bed. Now it’s night, and things got weird.

The sun went down, and the angry skeletons came out. That makes going anywhere and doing anything more dangerous than it was in the daylight. You can’t skip the night, and those skeletons aren’t afraid of your fire, so you might as well get to work.

First, craft yourself a torch, which both illuminates the night and keeps you warm when you’re away from your campfire. You may want to equip it in your off-hand. That’s the empty space at the far right of your backpack menu. That way you can hold your torch in one hand and punch things like trees and skeletons with your free hand.

Now that you’ve got the necessities handled, it’s time to make some higher-level items.

It’s not like anyone builds anything truly great without some tools, and that’s why your minifigure pal who was here when you arrived may have already suggested building a Crafting Bench.

Check out that blueprint, see what it takes to build a Crafting Bench, and do what you’re already good at: Gather the required resources, and build it back by your campfire. Build that, and the wood that you gathered can become tools, weapons and armor.

When you add that Crafting Bench to your humble settlement, you’ll learn a whole tier of possibilities and potential.

Wood is just a raw material. Build some machines with the blueprints you get, and you can then gather wood, refine it into the shapes you want and use those shapes to create tools to do everything faster and more efficiently, from building to defending.

Your First Fight

What about those skeletons? Also the spiders?

At this point in the game, you know what works really well? Running away from skeletons. There’s no shame in that. In fact, learning when to fight and when to scram is a sign of a smart and mature LEGO Fortnite player. Here in the earliest days, consider focusing on staying alive.

If you have a crafting bench, then build a sword and a shield. You’ll be astounded at how effective they are against once-terrifying enemies.

Your First Village

Well, you’ve learned that you can take resources from the world and create things with them. What if you could use resources even more efficiently?

Taking care of your world means finding and gathering and collecting its resources so that your world can ultimately take care of you.

Just about everything you do at the beginning of LEGO Fortnite unlocks possibilities for even more to build, but what good’s a big world without anyone to share it with? That’s where your friends come in, and in LEGO Fortnite, friends can mean a couple of different things.

First are your real-world friends, who you can invite into your island, as we wrote about in our guide to playing LEGO Fortnite with friends, who can help you do just about everything faster and safer.

Your world is also populated by a bunch of in-game friends, too. The more you build around your village, the more interesting your home base becomes, and soon you’ll find that your work is magnetic.

As you build the right things, people will start visiting your village. That starts with the Village Square, a super important item that effectively makes the surrounding area a proper village. It also allows you to level up your settlement. You’ll need to do things like build from blueprints and donate resources. As you upgrade your village, you’ll receive new blueprints, the ability to add more villagers and you’ll receive occasional surprise gifts and a variety of bonuses and perks.

Make sure to talk to visiting explorers. Invite them to stay. Offer them a bed and a roof of their own. Keep getting to know them, and they’ll be happy to continue the hard work that you started.

Take care of your friends, and they’ll take care of you.

Now you have a town and friends living in it. You’re using axes to chop the wood that you punched with your hands not long ago. You’ve built machines to refine those raw materials. You’ve built tools out of what you’ve collected and refined.

You’ve come a long way, and even though you’ve only just scratched the surface of LEGO Fortnite, you already have the fundamental skills that will guide you through the rest of the game.

The more you craft, the more you can build. The more you can build, the more friends you can invite to stay. The more friends you have, the more you can all work together to make even bigger and better things from tools to buildings to adventures. This is just a small collection of your firsts. There’s plenty that we haven’t touched on and that we hope you discover on your own. You’ve got a long way to go and the tools to get you there. And there is wherever you want to be. Because in LEGO Fortnite, the only limit is your imagination.