6 LEGO® Fortnite® Survival Tips

The best part about LEGO® Fortnite® might be that you‘re in charge of the story. You begin by dropping into a beautiful, familiar and sometimes dangerous world, but everything that happens next is yours to own. You tell your own story using a unique world that you created.

And in a LEGO Fortnite Survival world, adventure is an inherent part of your story.

Travel to the snowy mountains without preparing, and you’ll quite literally freeze to death. Brave the sandy desert before you’re ready, and the heat will be lethal. Those are the rules of the world, but what you do within the context of those rules is up to you.

To the LEGO Fortnite player in a Survival world, the cold, gray mountain peaks beckon for exploration. The feathered yellow glowing areas that dot the desert outcroppings beg to be explored. The jingling, tingling rainbow-colored sprite bouncing across the landscape must be followed.

In this guide, we’ll show you how to overcome the challenges inherent in your world. We’ll begin by discovering the world around you and its secrets, leading you to master your environment. We’ll also give you advanced strategies for crafting, harvesting resources, upgrading your village and defeating enemies.

First, Survive

Your first few days with LEGO Fortnite must be about survival — learning to craft and build and defend yourself. That starts with building some basic items using the most readily available resources, Wood and Granite and Vines, to make a Campfire and Torch. Gather more of those resources, and you can create a simple shelter and a bed.

Then, Thrive

You’ll also get a Crafting Bench, which is your gateway to turning that plentiful Wood and Granite into better items, like a Sword, Axe, Pickaxe and Shovel.

That’s how the hard work that you do gathering items pays off. You gather resources, and you use machines to refine those resources into better and more powerful items.

It works the same way with food as it does with Wood. After you create the Grill, you can cook Corn on it to create Corn on the Cob, which heals four hearts worth of health and increases the rate at which your Stamina (that bar that depletes when you run) regenerates for two minutes.

You can also build a Village Square, an item that turns the area surrounding wherever you put it into a proper village. It also has a kind of magnetic property, naturally attracting other NPC minifigures to your village.

It’s Dangerous to Go Alone

LEGO Fortnite Survival worlds are inherently dangerous places, and it’s better to play with friends who can help you gather resources and defeat enemies. In LEGO Fortnite, you have two choices of friends.

One of the first things you’ll do when you start a new world is create a village with the Village Square Blueprint. Not long after, friendly traveling minifigures will arrive in town. Speak to them a couple of times, and as long as you’ve got a bed for them, they’ll be happy to move in. Those non-player characters (NPCs) who move into your town can also join you on an adventure, wielding swords and shields of their own and fighting alongside you. Or they can hang out in the village, working the machines and creating items for you.

Tools, Weapons and Armor

At the beginning of your adventure, the simplest items have huge impacts. Just crafting a basic Common Forest Axe with a little Wood and Granite makes the trees that surround you possible to cut, drastically increasing the amount of Wood that you can collect. The Common Pickaxe has the same dramatic effect on boulders in the area. And crafting the Common Shovel is your first step toward becoming a farmer.

The same is true for weapons, but they’re out of your reach until you use a Blueprint to create the Lumber Mill. Feed your Wood to that machine, and you can create the Wooden Rod and the Plank. Create five Wooden Rods, and bring them back to the Crafting Bench, and you can craft the Common Shortsword, which turns every battle in the early game into an advantage for you.

LEGO Fortnite’s other early-game weapon, the Common Recursive Crossbow, uses the same kind of Wooden Rods that we used for the Shortsword, as well as one Cord, which you can make with a Blueprint that creates the Spinning Wheel and donating some of the Vines that you pick up when you destroy bushes. And for ammunition, you’ll need some wood and some Feathers, which you can get from birds like the adorable but entirely dispensable chickens hopping around in the grass.

On the defensive side, there’s the Common Knight Shield. You’ll just need to make some Planks at the Lumber Mill and some Cord at the Spinning Wheel to craft it.

You may have noticed the word Common appearing in front of the items we just talked about. That’s because LEGO Fortnite items have rarities, which denote their power. Common are the most basic versions of an item, followed by Uncommon, Rare and Epic. The greater the rarity for a sword, the more damage it does, for example. But to build those less common tools, you’ll need to find and gather less common items.

There’s more than one way to improve your weapons.

The Crafting Bench menu has two tabs: one for creating Crafting Recipes and another called Bench Upgrade. You’ll see that you can donate some items and increase the level of tools, weapons, survival equipment and accessories.

Upgrade your Crafting Bench, and now you can make the Uncommon Forest Axe.

Caves

Start exploring Caves, which are dotted all over your Survival world’s landscape. Caves are the most lucrative and dangerous areas in the game, especially early on. To find a cave, just look for giant boulders rising out of the ground. Circle around them until you find an entrance.

Before you go in, make sure you’re prepared. You should have a Torch to light your way, as well as the basic tools for survival, including a Sword, Shield Axe and Pickaxe of the highest quality that you can make at the Crafting Bench.

Caves are filled with enemies – Rollers, Skeletons, Scorpions and Spiders – and rich with resources.

They’re basically bursting with Wood, which means that you can easily make campfires to light the surrounding area and mark where you’ve already been in the labyrinthine underground areas.

They’re also full of rocks, which will make your Pickaxe super useful. Pay careful attention to the color of the rocks, and you’ll see that dark rocks break down into Granite, while light rocks produce Marble, a new rock that you can only find in Caves.

Likewise, there are plenty of logs on the ground and scraggly dead trees that you can collect Wood from. But the lighter, gnarled wood growing out of the walls and ceilings are an excellent target for your Pickaxe. Swing away, and they produce Knotroot, another Cave-exclusive item.

Finally, Caves are the place to find Slurp Mushrooms, which are a cooking ingredient for later recipes.

Beyond collecting resources, your broader goal in a Cave is to find the exit, which will bring you to a new part of the map.

Exploring Different Biomes

Up until now, we’ve concentrated on the area surrounding your first village, but the world that you created when you started playing LEGO Fortnite is genuinely enormous. If you’ve ever climbed to a high hill or swung the camera around to see the horizon in every direction, you’ve probably seen something tantalizing, like a gorgeous mountain in the distance.

That mountain is part of a biome, which are effectively discrete geographical areas in LEGO Fortnite. There are a few to familiarize yourself with.

• Grasslands are where you are likely to begin your adventure, where the temperature is comfortable during the day and chilly at night and the grass stretches over gentle hills into the distance. It’s the best place to build your first village.
• Frostlands are icy cold LEGO Fortnite regions, covered in snow and sprouting mountains. The moment you walk into them, you’ll receive the Cold status effect and take continuous damage. Go deeper, and you’ll find yourself Freezing, a state of being so cold that a Torch has no effect and the only way to combat it is by making a recipe at the Grill called the Spicy Burger.
• Dry Valley is the desert region, where the air shimmers as the temperature rises and you’re inflicted with the Hot status effect and constantly lose health. To combat that, you’ll need to gather and eat Snow Berries that grow natively in Frostlands or make a Snowberry Shake after building a Juicer to grant yourself 10 minutes of protection from the heat with each chug.
• A Coast is a lot like a Dry Valley desert near a body of water, and they contain some of the same resources as a Dry Valley as well as things like Raspberries that you can also find in Grasslands.

It’s typically pretty obvious when you enter a new biome, but if you’re not sure which one you’re in, there are two ways to find out. As you transition between biomes, LEGO Fortnite will tell you which one you’re entering with a little text underneath the map icon at the top right of your screen. And that map icon will change to denote your current biome in a thumbnail. The other way to find out is to open your map, and look at the lower left, where it’ll tell you directly.

Each biome contains unique points of interest, resources to gather and challenges to overcome. And now you’re ready for them!