A guide to building the best village in LEGO® Fortnite®

Half of the LEGO® Fortnite® adventure is about staying fed, safe and alive. The other half is about being a civil engineer, a town planner, a hospitality specialist who’s always making friends while you roleplay as a serial founder – of villages!

LEGO Fortnite villages are customization playgrounds, places that you can call your own and tweak almost infinitely. They’re a way of taking the unique world that you were given and remaking it in your image, with whatever buildings, characters, factories and decorations that you desire.

In this LEGO Fortnite village guide, we’ll show you how to build your dream town, from picking the ideal location to furnishing and decorating it and building relationships with your fellow minifigures.

The Best Village Locations

The best location for your first village depends on the type of world you’re playing in and what your goals are.

When you’re playing in a Survival world, you already know that nothing comes easily. You’ve got to earn everything, grinding it out in a beautiful, if unforgiving, world. If you want to build a Campfire, you must find and collect the necessary ingredients first. In a Survival world, everything you build and collect is a testament to your effort, and in that sense, your village is a monument to your hard work.

But even though getting started can be challenging, you can make it easier on yourself, starting with your first village’s location. Spend a few minutes scoping out the land. Pick an area close to resources like Wood and Granite as well as food like Corn, Pumpkins and Raspberries. You’ll need items like these to survive and thrive, so it makes sense to place your first village where they’re in abundance. Why walk a mile to find a Pumpkin or Granite or Wood? Build your village next to a rocky pumpkin patch by the woods!

Making Friends

What’s a village without villagers? A ghost town, and nobody wants that! What you need are people to fill in the place that you create, and that process happens in tandem with your hard work.

One of the first Blueprints you receive in LEGO Fortnite is the Village Square. Build that where you want your village to be. It only costs 10 Wood and 10 Granite, and those are among the most plentiful resources in the game.

A Village Square has a kind of magnetic effect on minifigures. Build it, and it will attract friendly NPC characters who are out exploring your world. When you find them at random hanging out near your Village Square, talk to them. It won’t take long until you can invite them to live in your village. You really only need a bed for them (and preferably some shelter), and they’ll be thrilled to move in.

Think of these as your new friends, and keep up the conversation. Pretty quickly, they’ll want to help you, and you can assign tasks to them, like gathering nearby resources or using machines like the Crafting Bench to create items out of the resources you’ve gathered.

Upgrading Your Village

You can increase the level of your village in the Upgrade Village hub in the Village Square menu. Doing so allows you to invite more people to live at your village, adds perks and even unlocks recipes for builds and furniture.

There are always multiple requirements for upgrading your village. Two or more are based on materials like Wood or Planks or Marble Slabs, but those materials aren’t always the same for every level at every village.

Every time you upgrade your village, you gain new bonuses.

● Level 1: You start attracting visitors. Your first villager can move in.

● Level 2: Villagers can gather nearby resources as well as refine wood and stone.

● Level 3: Another villager can move in. You’ll get gifts from your villagers.

● Level 4: New villager jobs include cooking, extracting seeds and farming. Woodcutting villagers also produce more wood types.

● Level 5: Rarer explorers arrive. Each villager gets more health and defense. One more villager can move in.

● Level 6: Villagers can smelt metal, refine textiles and collect gems. Stonecutting villagers will produce more types of stone.

● Level 7: Villagers have new and unique recipes to give you.

● Level 8: An additional villager can move in.

● Level 9: Villagers can forage resources from other biomes. Woodcutting villagers produce even more types of wood. Stonecutting villagers produce even more types of stone.

● Level 10: An additional villager can move in.

The other thing you’ll need to upgrade at each level is your Village Rating, and that’s less clear than the obvious resource requirements. Essentially, you need to build and decorate to increase your Village Rating, which is represented by the horizontal yellow line between the level you’re at and the next level in the Upgrade Village menu. You can also see it at the top right of your screen when you’re standing in your village.

If you’re stuck or confused, consider building something new, decorating something you’ve already built or trying something new like farming. Crafting buildings from blueprints tends to have a huge effect on your Village Rating, and so does building Stations like the Crafting Bench, Lumber Mill and more advanced machines like the Juicer.

Building

What’s a village without buildings? Not much more than a barren patch of land, so your first order of business is to build out your village. As you increase your village’s level, you’ll unlock new blueprints for buildings, all of which offer various sizes around an architectural theme. Your builds begin with humble Starter Shacks and then move on to Log Cabin, Pleasant Park, Majestic Manors and Shogun Palace.

It doesn’t seem to matter what you build, as long as you keep building and keep adding useful things to the area and increasing your Village Rating.

Farming

Imagine a world where you don’t have to run around hoping to find random Raspberries or Pumpkins. Imagine knowing where to find them. That’s the point of farming in LEGO Fortnite: to have a steady supply of the food you want to eat at all times.

Your ultimate goal is to create a Garden Plot – ideally, lots of them – and plant seeds that bloom into plants there.

You’ll need a Shovel, which you can make early on at the Crafting Bench. Use that to dig in the ground, and you’ll collect Soil as well as the occasional seed that you can plant later.

You also need Fertilizer, which you can find by watching grazing animals and seeing what falls out of their backsides.

Combine 2 Soil and 1 Fertilizer to create a Garden Plot, which becomes a Plot of Soil on the ground, and plant the seeds you’ve collected in there to grow the plants. Now you’re a farmer!

There are several seeds available in the game: Corn Kernel, Pumpkin Seed, Raspberry Seed, Wheat Grain, Slapberry Seed, Pepper Seed and Chill berry Seed. As we said above, you can sometimes find some seeds just by digging randomly into the ground. We’ve also found plenty in chests scattered throughout our worlds. The most advanced strategy begins after you get the Grain Mill Blueprint and create that machine. Then you can put the food that you find into it and get seeds as a result. For example, giving the Grain Mill one Raspberry produces two Raspberry Seeds, which you can then plant.

Keep in mind that some of what you plant will continue to grow, while other things need to be replanted. Slapberry Seeds produce a bush, and the Slapberries that you pick off of that bush will grow back in time. Pumpkins don’t grow back. Once you pick them, they’re done, and you’ll have to plant new Pumpkin Seeds in the now-empty Plot of Soil if you want to grow more.

Defense

You’ll meet many friendly faces and creatures in LEGO Fortnite, but not everyone or everything will be happy to see you, and you should consider building some defenses against your world’s meanest inhabitants.

You’ll find defensive builds even among the earliest sets. If you want to keep those nighttime Skeletons out, consider building a series of Log Cabin Palisade Gates around the perimeter of your village. You can even use the Starter Shack Log Lookout, which is basically a large staircase leading to a landing, as a place to keep your valuables in a chest.

The first village you create is a sort of experiment. Take your knowledge and put it to use somewhere else on the map. You can build more than one village. Correct your mistakes. Think about what you’d do differently. Create a village based on a theme. There’s no wrong way to express yourself in LEGO Fortnite, so embrace your imagination and keep building!