Fortnite’s core discipline is and remains building bases. While in the early areas, any somewhat competent team can hold back the waves of threats with a few wooden structures, you will need to build sophisticated fortifications in later stages. Learn here in our guide how to build a good base.
Fortnite is a fun coop shooter where you take down zombies and build fortifications against them. At the beginning of the game, it’s not too serious and you can just put a few boards around the mission objective and team up to siege the spawn points of the monsters.
However, later on, the zombies become much more numerous and tougher. Stronger beasts require new tactics. Here you’ll learn some tricks for base building that will help you out.
Fortnite – Base Guide – Basic Tips
When building bases, a few fundamentals should first be considered:
- Constructors build faster and require one less unit of material per upgrade level. This pays off in the long run, so prefer your constructor when building bases.
- When gathering resources, always hit from the side where the object is smallest or narrowest and focus on the bottom point. This way, you hit the circle for faster gathering much more often.
- In missions where you have to feed a machine with BlueGlow and then activate it, you can see after entering the BlueGlow where the zombies will appear on the map. So before you finally turn on the machine, you can particularly insidiously line the path of the monsters to your fortification with traps.
- If you invite friends to base building and give them building rights (in the Storm Shield menu), everything goes faster. But be careful to invite only people you trust. A troll could just tear your fort down laughing maliciously.
- If you want to tear down parts of your base, you can do it faster with this trick. Always destroy the bottom layer in multi-story constructions; then everything above will crumble.
- Keep in mind during base building – especially as a solo player – that you need to move quickly from A to B. Bridges are ideal for this. They allow you to cross your base unhindered when the opponent is attacking another location. Jump pads are even more effective, catapulting you across the map when placed cleverly. So think about such details before your first shovel stroke!
Fortnite – Base Tricks – The Triple Wall
A simple wall eventually becomes useless, no matter how solidly you build it. Three walls are already better, but where to get the space for them? There’s a simple trick to get three walls into one building slot. Proceed as follows:
- First, build a normal, large wall.
- Build a floor plate behind the wall.
- Go to the customization menu and delete the two floor spaces directly behind the wall. This will create a small mini-wall in front of the remaining two floor plates.
- Build a slanted wall (Menu F4) over everything, which covers the small wall from the floor plate and meets the top edge of the tall, first wall. If a zombie wants to get through there, it first has to tear down the first wall, then overcome the small wall, and finally take down the slanted wall. Triple effort for the enemy, triple protection for you!
Fortnite – Base Tips – Pyramids instead of Houses
If you want to protect a mission objective, like an Atlas, you shouldn’t just build a square house around it. A pyramid is much more effective, which you can build using the slope settings. Pyramids not only look great, but they are also walkable.
So if the enemies are coming from the other side, you can easily climb up using the incline of the walls and quickly take the enemies under fire. With a square structure, you would have had to walk around the building to climb it. Or additional stairs and thus material costs would have been necessary.
Fortnite – Base Building – Here’s How Deadly Chokepoints Look
Walls alone are not always enough. Against particularly strong monsters or hordes, even a massive wall setup can quickly become a wreck. Therefore, it is important to seem to provide the zombies with comfortable passageways. You then pepper these with traps. Proceed as follows:
- In the logic of zombies, a passage after a maximum of three wall sections is more sensible than struggling through the wall.
- Therefore, there should be an opening every three wall pieces.
- Keep in mind that zombies tend to target you. If you are standing on a wall, it may be that the zombies attack the wall to reach you, so keep an eye on this when planning your defense. Thus, build your walkways in places that are further back from the zombies.
- To ensure the passage is not a stroll but a death trap, build a kind of tunnel of death there!
- Build a tunnel behind the passage in the wall with floors, walls, and ceilings.
- Pave the walls, ceilings, and floors in the passage with traps.
- Use not only thick damage traps but also CC traps (Crowd-Control, i.e., effects that slow down enemies). This way, you or any defender NPCs stationed there can wreak havoc with their weapons even more effectively.
- Make the death tunnels as long as possible. Especially at high levels, otherwise too many creatures will break through and go unnoticed to destroy your base. At lower levels, three to five fields full of traps are enough; later, it can be ten or more to establish an effective death tunnel.
Also interesting: Fortnite – 20 Tips for Beginners
