The Best Upgrades to Get First in LEGO® Fortnite®

LEGO® Fortnite® Survival mode will feel like home to anyone who’s spent some quality time with LEGO bricks or played games focused on exploration and crafting. Still, venturing into your first world can be a bit intimidating, regardless of how much experience you have and whether you’re going it alone or playing alongside family or friends.

These tips on which early items and upgrades to focus your attention on will help you get the most out of your explorations and set you up well for the deeper construction and adventuring fun to follow.

Get Better Tools and Weapons Right Away

Making early progress in LEGO Fortnite can be as rewarding as it is challenging. Prioritizing better tools and weapons for your character is a great way to get used to how resources and items work while also making it easier to progress toward other goals.

Toppling a few small trees with your fists will net you enough Wood to build your first Crafting Bench, and after that you can create a Lumber Mill and start building the entire range of Common tools and weapons. Many items in LEGO Fortnite come in one of four different rarity levels: Common, Uncommon, Rare and Epic. For tools and weapons, higher rarity levels mean more capabilities and longer durability.

Simply put, you don’t want to spend too much time or resources replacing Common weapons and Tools as they break. Spend 8 Planks and 3 Shells (harvested from defeating Rollers, which you can spot from a distance by looking for the plant atop their rocky armor) to upgrade your Crafting Bench and you’ll unlock the option for making Longswords and other Uncommon weapons and tools.

Getting Uncommon gear early will make venturing into the Caves you’ll find in the Grasslands much more fruitful, as you need Uncommon Forest Axes to harvest the tough Knotwood and Uncommon Pickaxes to mine the Marble you’ll find inside. The extra damage you’ll deal to simple enemies like Rollers and Skeletons is worth the early investment, too.

Craft Yourself a Health Charm

It’s dangerous to go alone in LEGO Fortnite, especially at the beginning! With only 3 hearts to start with, your character will feel less like a minifigure made of sturdy plastic and more like they’re made of tissue paper. Factor in the health losses from hunger and environmental effects, and you might find it’s easy to lose all of those hearts in the blink of an eye.

Worry not! Within a few minutes of item collection and building, it’s possible to craft Health Charm items that raise your maximum hearts and boost your character’s defense, making those hearts worth more. Health Charms are a type of item that can be placed in the Equipment section of your inventory (at the bottom right), meaning they don’t take up the spaces needed for handheld items or for collectable resources (on the left).

By upgrading a Crafting Bench one time to unlock the option to build Uncommon tools and weapons, you’ll also unlock the ability to craft Uncommon Health Charms, which add two hearts. Made from 1 Shell and 3 pieces of Silk Thread (which you can get from Spiders), these charms are a good return on the items needed to craft them in the early game.

There are better Health Charms and related Hearty Totems you’ll be able to make later on, and don’t forget that you can use multiple items in the Equipment section to add up their powers! At the start, though, getting up to 5 hearts and keeping some food for its healing properties in your inventory should at least give you a good shot of escaping any encounters you’re not quite ready for yet.

Invest in Your Village

The word ‘survival’ might make you think of roughing it alone out in the wilderness, a solitary journey defined by scarcity and struggle. LEGO Fortnite isn’t always a walk in the park, but it’d hardly be a LEGO game without reasons to build and use your imagination, and combining that with Fortnite means there’s a wide cast of fun and helpful characters to meet.

Try to upgrade your first Village by a few levels early on, even if exploring for hours and testing your limits is the LEGO Fortnite experience you’re after. Having additional hearts and better gear probably won’t be enough the first time you run into a big group of monsters or a hulking Brute. Until you have more hearts and begin getting Rare-quality crafted items and higher, it’s always a good idea to have a villager with you!

You can bring your very first villager adventuring with you, but then you might find yourself handling more chores and item collection than you’d like each time you come back. Getting your Village to Level 3 lets you add a second permanent villager, and you can assign them a job. Having a villager to back you up while you explore means you’ll survive longer and collect more items, and having another doing work back at the Village while you’re out means you’ll be able to spend your collected goods on useful crafting items and buildings quicker and more easily.

As you play more LEGO Fortnite, either in the same world or new ones, think of these tips as something you can repeat if you’re at a loss. If you’ve just upgraded your Village, consider looking to see if you’re close to unlocking a new tool or crafting another Health Charm. When your character reaches a new plateau of power and health, check out what you can do to improve your Village and equip the villagers living in it.