Video Game / Fortnite

Don't take shelter. Make it.

"If you told me ten years ago that there'd be a game where Chun Li can kill Darth Vader with a twelve-gauge in front of Hamster Chief as Batman and Joker throw up Wu-Tang in the background, and that this game was free...it would've turned my neurons to dust!"

— TheRussianBadger, Hamster Chief Lobsters the Fortbite

Fortnite^note The game's title is meant to be read as a literal "fort night", meaning "a period of time lasting two weeks", which is a rare, but totally, grammatically legitimate way of interpreting the word fortnight is a Third-Person Shooter developed by Epic Games and released into Early Access on July 25, 2017, ending on June 30, 2020. It's a building/exploration game with a Zombie Apocalypse-style vibe.

Fortnite is effectively six games; each of the supermodes have their own unique rules and mechanics:

• Save the World: The game's original, "intended" mode. A super-natural storm has caused 98% of the world's population to disappear, with Zombie-like monsters called Husks appearing all over the place where the storm hits. As one of the few survivors, you have found a robot-crewed station with the power and technology to fight the storm. With their help, maybe you can figure out how to stop the storm and restore the world. To do that, you need to gather Heroes and Survivors, mine or scavenge materials, and build a mighty fortress from which to launch your operations.
• Battle Royale: Released in September of 2017, this is a 100-person free-for-all where the players are parachuted onto an island and battle each other for supremacy, with the same construction system from Save the World.^note There is also a variant of this mode called "Zero Build", first introduced in Chapter 3 Season 2, which completely omits the building mechanic. Players can either fight solo in an every-player-for-themselves match, or get into Duos (2-person teams), Trios (3-person teams) or Squads (4-person teams) and fight against other same-sized teams. Occasionally, there are special limited-time modes, including 50v50 where players are split into two teams of 50, and LTMs where a specific set of weapons can be used (only gold, explosives, snipers only, weapons that are currently vaulted, etc.). While not part of the game's original design, this mode would come to define the game (see below).
• Creative: Released in December of 2018, this is a sand-box using Battle Royale's gameplay. The player constructs their own island by placing and editing previous and new assets, and one can invite up to fifteen other players to play around. Players are given various exclusive tools and modifiers that can be used to create their own games, from races to deathmatches to sillier things like soccer matches. Particularly good creations are featured by Epic themselves with cycling "Featured Islands".
• LEGO Fortnite: Released in December of 2023, LEGO Fortnite is a survival-crafting experience similar to Save the World, but set in a LEGO world with minifigure versions of various characters from the other modes.
• Rocket Racing: Released in December of 2023, this is an arcade Racing Game that is a spin-off of fellow Epic Games property Rocket League, and is co-developed by Rocket League's primary developer, Psyonix. While the gameplay is quite different, the vehicle design is directly lifted from Rocket League, and some cosmetics can be transferred between both games.
• Fortnite Festival: Released in December of 2023, Festival is a Rhythm Game that can be played both solo and with friends, playing a variety of instruments similar to games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band. Co-developed by Harmonix.
• Fortnite X Disney Universe: A mode that was announced on February 7th, 2024, and set for an unknown date. While little is known about the future mode at present, it is intended to serve as the crown jewel of Fortnite's repeated crossovers with Disney, with players able to watch the company's content in-game and "create their own experiences".

The similarities in Battle Royale mode to PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds did not go unnoticed, not least of all by the latter's developers who went as far as to sue Epic Games (the suit was eventually dropped) — but the mode has become extremely popular, especially after it was offered free-to-play separately from the main game. The Battle Royale mode is now one of the most popular games on the planet. It is also widely regarded as the first significantly popular game with the post-Millennial generational cohort born after the year 2000.

Battle Royale, Creative, LEGO Fortnite, Rocket Racing, and Fortnite Festival are available for free with the option to purchase cosmetic items on Microsoft Windows, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, and Android. There is also an iOS version of the game available, however it is currently unavailable for download due to Apple removing the game from the App Store in August 2020. Subsequently, this version does not include the latter three modes introduced in December 2023.

Save the World is only available on the Windows, PlayStation and Xbox versions. It was to become free-to-play in a manner similar to Battle Royale, but on June 30, 2020, Epic Games reversed course and made Save the World an exclusively paid mode.

Starting from Chapter 1 Season 4, Battle Royale introduced an overarching narrative explaining the various events taking place as the weeks went by. A full recap can be found here.

Note that some seasons that take place before the Chapter 2 ones are usually referred without the "Chapter 1" part.

As part of the 2020 Crossover event, Marvel published Fortnite X Marvel Nexus War that gives backstory to how Thor came to the Fortnite world, while DC published Batman/Fortnite: Zero Point for the 2021 event. This was followed by Fortnite X Marvel Zero War series in 2022.

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Examples:

All Modes

• Adaptation Name Change: In LEGO Fortnite, none of the NPC villagers use pre-established names from other media. This results in Johnny Thunder being named "Sawyer", Cecilia being named "Sally Sails", and Pirate Cook Bart being named "Salty".
• A.K.A.-47: Those based on real guns have their names filed off and replaced with generic names (Assault Rifle, Submachine Gun etc) or have cool names given to them (The M60 "Terminator" as an example).
• Always Check Behind the Chair: As a game that takes place in a large world that encourages (or demands) thorough exploration, you might want to look through every nook and cranny (and break some stuff) to find something that can help you, like, say, an ammo box.
• Barbie Doll Anatomy: None of the shirtless male outfits (Aquaman, Dominion, etc.) or heroes have nipples.
• Barefoot Cartoon Animal: Played straight with Dire and Fennix, averted with Meowscles and Dolph.
• Boyish Short Hair:
  • The black female default in Battle Royale, known as Banshee in Save the World.
  • The ninja Mari and the soldier Evelynn, the latter used as the base model for various Battle Royale skins.
  • The female sniper defender and the female Scouting and Training Squad lead survivors.
  • The bounty huntress Reese in the fifteenth season of Battle Royale.
• Colorblind Mode: This game has modes for protanopia, deuteranopia, and tritanopia, each of which can have a level which changes how strongly it's adjusted. According to players on Reddit, D10 also helps see through storm and T10 makes nighttime looks nice.
• Combat Resuscitation: Works differently depending on the mode. In Battle Royale, the down-but-not-out phase is skipped if you don't have any teammates (or they're all also down), and revival takes ten uninterrupted seconds to restore 30 health. In Save the World, you have three Video-Game Lives that you can use to respawn on the spot with full health and shield, after a ten-second delay; getting a teammate's assistance lets you skip that delay and save the life.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!: The controls for all three modes differ from one another in some ways. For example, for the PC version, the keys for building structures from mats are assigned to letters in Save the World, but mapped to the function keys in Battle Royale and Creative.
• The Dead Can Dance:
  • The boogie bomb from Battle Royale works on Cube Monsters and Ice Monsters as well as other players.
  • The STW Summer event of 2019 introduced a whole range of weapons and even a wall trap meant to do this to husks.
• Dressing as the Enemy: In Save the World, some Survivors are dressed like Husks. In seasons two and three of Battle Royale Chapter 2, you can enter a red booth to disguise yourself as a henchman to sneak into bases filled with them and you can wear it until you enter another red booth, fire your weapon or get hit by a weapon.
• Evil Laugh: An emote from the Chapter 2 Season 8 battle pass. It's even called "MWAHAHA".
• Explosive Stupidity: You can get yourself killed by your own explosive weapons. In Battle Royale, there are multiple kill feed messages for this:
  (player) played themselves
  (player) took the L
  (player) went out with a BANG!
• Expy Coexistence: Season 3's Reaper was a fairly transparent Captain Ersatz of John Wick. Many seasons later, after the game had become a massive financial success, a licensing deal would be struck allowing an actual John Wick skin.
• Gatling Good:
  • Save the World: All Soldiers, with the exception of Centurion, can whip out a minigun that lasts for ten seconds of continuous fire, with unlimited ammo. The Commando and Warlord variants start with it, others can unlock it at high levels.
  • Battle Royale: Miniguns are among the various weapons you can find as loot, available in purple and orange rareness. It runs on light ammo and has a very large bullet spread, making it less useful for combat unless an enemy is right in front of you. However, it's extremely effective against structures.
• Geo Effects: A general strategy that everyone knows by now is to spam walls, ramps, and even spans like crazy to provide your team with cover and vantage points over the enemy team.
• Guns Do Not Work That Way: Unfortunately, while the guns are cool, some of them do not work as intended. One of the fully-automatic shotguns is based on the Kel-Tec KSG, which is pump-action only, and feeds from twin tube magazines rather than a removable drum.
• Guys Smash, Girls Shoot: There's quite a few shooting Husks, but the Lobber, the only visibly female Husk, is the artillery.
• Impossible Hour Glass Figure: All the female characters have very impressive hour glass figures along with buxom breasts and voluptuous yet athletic bodies, especially the Constructor and Soldier classes.
• Highly-Visible Ninja: Ninjas in this game are clad in metal armor, and some get wide brimmed hats or cat ear hoodies - if that's not enough, leveling your weapons can get you glowing swords.
• Homemade Sweater from Hell: A new emote from Winterfest 2021 - you actually knit it on the spot, and it comes out with one sleeve too short. Subverted with the recurring sweater-clad holiday skins, which have the requisite bright patterns but nothing deliberately off model.
• Kleptomaniac Hero: To an extent rivaling Terraria, only more destructive in some ways. Justified in that 98% of the world's population is already dead and that you don't exactly have the luxury of figuring out if certain bits of property are owned by one of the 2% who aren't.
• Lampshade Hanging: When the Blockbuster questline starts with Ray having to leave Homebase to investigate - while still functioning as your Mission Control.
  Spitfire: Then how am I still hearing her voice?
  Lok: She pre-tapes EVERYTHING!
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall:
  • The game's camera is the Commander's viewpoint from the shelter's periscope.
  • Lampshaded in Season 9 when the best known game element from Battle Royale - the Advancing Wall of Doom - gets ported into Save the World.
  Ray: You know those rumors you may've been hearing of an even more dangerous part of the storm? A corrosive storm that closes in on you, eventually swallowing you alive? Remember how I said that would never, ever, ever happen here?... It's happening here.
  • Speaking of BR, the Device event from the end of Chapter 2 Season 2 involves a peek into an Alternate Universe from BR or STW, or possibly a flashback to how all this started, where Jonesy, who does get lines in STW, is Suddenly Voiced in BR.
  Jonesy: (looking right into the camera) Y- You can hear me?
  • The very last line heard in the Blockbuster quest:
  Sanitary Jack: Well, I guess that's the end of this little adventure.
  • The Impostor questline reveals that the storm can now create an Evil Twin of Dennis.
  Lok: We're far too late into the narrative to introduce a new threat!
• Limited Loadout: You can carry a limited number of weapons in all modes. The maximum number of weapons you can carry in Save the World depends on your backpack, but you can only assign three weapons to be rapidly equipped. In Battle Royale and Creative, you can carry up to 5 weapons, but the Bandage Bazooka introduced in the first season of Chapter 2 takes up 2 weapon slots, and some custom maps in Creative may further restrict the number of weapons one can carry.
• Ms. Fanservice: A significant amount of the female skins are made for this trope as a result of being very beautiful in addition to having very form fitting outfits, voluptuous yet toned bodies, buxom breasts, long toned yet shapely legs, and toned firm rear ends (which can also lead to receiving Male Gaze from certain players).
• Multiple Life Bars: Green for standard health and blue for shield with shield going down before health. Fall damage (all modes), going in the storm and standing on fire (Battle Royale only) will impact health regardless of shield.
• Mythology Gag:
  • In Chapter 2 Season 4 of Battle Royale, they add a make of driveable car called the Whiplash, which is tied to an acheivement you must execute in the Iron Man skin - Iron Man 2 introduced Whiplash during a car racing event.
  • The Ghostbusters skins intended as a tie-in with Ghostbusters: Afterlife got an official emote in November 2021, which is actually taken from the end credits of The Real Ghostbusters.
• Named by the Adaptation: Multiple LEGO minifigures who were either unnamed or referred to by generic titles, especially from the collectible LEGO Minifigures line, appear as named NPC villagers in LEGO Fortnite. These include Silas (Hiker), Robin (Bird-watcher), Otis (Farmer), Roan (Groom), Sprocket (a mechanic), Flint (a LEGO Ideas paleontologist), Petra (Paleontologist), Snow Cap (a LEGO City arctic driver), Carl Reef (Shipwreck Survivor), Gus (T-Rex Costume Fan), Slush (a LEGO City penguin-suited vendor), Tabby (Tiger Woman), Lionbrand (a LEGO Icons lion knight), Nugget (a LEGO Education prospector), and Dana (a LEGO Castle milkmaid).
• Never Say "Die": Battle Royale has those teleporters that remove players upon elimination, while Save the World just says that part of humanity was snapped out and replaced with husks (despite one of your player characters actually saying "I think I know that guy!") That said, the Blockbuster questline has this glaring aversion:
  Spitfire: If you try to send a team after me... I'll kill them.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot:
  • Dire (the Season 6 Tier 100 skin in Battle Royale and a Mythical hero in Save the World) is a werewolf ninja.
  • Keelhaul from the "Yarr!" questline in Save the World is a pirate ninja.
• Not Using the "Z" Word: "Husks" and "Cube Monsters".
• One-Steve Limit: Kevin is both the name of Ray's pyramid-shaped, robotic assistant from Save the World and the giant purple cube from Battle Royale.
  "Introducing...Kevin!....The triangle one!"
  • Thanks to the crossover with Alien, there's a new back bling that's the cat carrier for the cat from the first movie, also named Jonesy (the flavor text firmly states "no relation").
  • Similarly, the Chapter 2 Season 6 Battle Pass has Raven from Teen Titans, despite Raven also existing as a male skin with oddly similar dress sense.
  • One that stretches across both game modes - there's a ninja named Sarah in Save the World long before Battle Royale added a Sarah Connor skin. Becomes Hilarious in Hindsight if you've followed the Blockbuster and Long Road Home questlines.
  • This even happens within Epic media - Chapter 2 Season 7 adds a radio host called Mari, which is most certainly not the ninja Mari from Save The World. Later on, they add Windwalker Echo from the Unreal Engine demo, despite an unrelated spy named Echo already existing.
  • Despite debuting just after the start of Hawkeye, the Battle Pass for Chapter 3 Season 1 has a Ronin that is clearly not the same as MCU Ronin, despite having the same fashion sense and even arm tattoos.
• Old Soldier:
  • One of your Defenders in Save the World is a Friendly Sniper who is a senior librarian with completely white hair and beard, and wears reading glasses.
  • In the other two modes, you can unlock and play as the outfit "Bunker Jonesy", an old version of Jonesy with a massive, blond beard.
• Our Zombies Are Different:
  • Husks fit the general profile of the undead, but they have curious aspects that differentiate them from your typical zombie - they're summoned by the Storm as opposed to just wandering around, they come in several varieties, and aside from mindlessly chasing after human targets when spotted, they (and the Storm itself) seems to know what is a priority target at any one time, from devices that directly threaten the Storm, Lars' Van when it's taking off, landing weather balloons, to damaged/unoccupied storm shelters, crashed probes and giant fireworks for some reason, indicating the Storm is intelligent in some manner.
  • Cube monsters in Battle Royale Season 6 and Chapter 2 Season 8 - they actually spawn from cube fragments and are apparently made of rock, but behave enough like zombies that players started calling them that anyway.
• Patchwork Map:
  • In Season 9, the island contained a grassy region, a desert region, a snowy region, a tropical jungle region, and a dormant volcano, all coexisting together.
  • Over in Save the World gameplay is limited to one patch at a time, but from the aerial view you've got patches of city and suburbia, with grasslands typically on the outer areas, but not very consistently, especially when you get to Twine Peaks.
• Photo Mode: The Replay System has a few camera options and display settings.
• Play Every Day:
  • In both modes, the first time you log in each server day (UTC) you'll unlock a new daily challenge. Completing it in Battle Royale awards XP to help you level up your battle pass,^note Before Chapter 2 merged the season level with battle pass tiers to simplify progression, it awarded 500 XP and 5 Battle Stars for your Battle Pass. while in Save the World it awards you with 50 V-Bucks and 240 Gold.^note Previously 100 Daily Coins, but these were removed to simplify the item shop. You can hold up to three challenges if you didn't complete them immediately, and once per day you can reroll one if you don't like it.
  • In Save the World, a new reward is given for every log-in. This includes people, llamas, schematics, and V-Bucks.
• Punny Title: The "14 Days of Fortnite" event is a fortnight of Fortnite.
• Reality Bleed: It's not just Marvel characters crossing over during Chapter 2 Season 4. Landmarks from the Marvel universe are gradually appearing on the island, seemingly ripped out in spherical chunks, with Rifts manifesting nearby.
• Rewarding Vandalism: You can and will ransack people's houses and tear them apart (and/or down) to gather materials and find weapons, traps, and ammunition. One chest location in Lucky Landing requires you to chop down a big cherry blossom in order to uncover the chest.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter: Kit, a small calico cat with a rather kawaii face! Meowscles may count for having the same face as Kit.
• Ridiculously Fast Construction: Wanna build a wall, floor, ceiling, ramp, or roof? Anything you want to build is fully functional the moment you set it down (i.e. floors and stairs can be walked on, walls block projectiles), and takes only a few more seconds to reach full health. Wood objects in particular take about 5 seconds to finish, while brick and metal take a bit longer.
• Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory:
  • From Save the World: the rifts appearing in each map apparently do more than generate husks, as our heroes start coming across physical evidence of alternate timelines, like Steel Wool records that were never made, according to the members of Steel Wool now with your Homebase.
  • From Battle Royale: Tomato Temple was apparently formed when the tomato head was sent hundreds of years in the past, but you remember that it was Tomato Town a few months ago... don't you?
• Running Gag: Llamas are everywhere in both game modes.
• Schizo Tech: Cars range in design from the 1920s to the 80's. This probably the only game where you can find a 60's-style Hot Rod on hydraulics.
• Series Mascot: The Piñata Llama.
• Shout-Out: Quite a lot to the point that it has its own page.
• Sigil Spam: That well-loved V-bucks logo is revealed in Save the World to be the Vindertech logo, found on buildings and machines and everything techy. How big a company do you have to be to have your own currency?
• Soft Water: Averted, landing on water pools and lakes is the same as landing on the ground, until Chapter 2 added bodies of water deep enough to swim in.
• Spikes of Doom: For once, you get to make these.
• Suddenly Voiced:
  • Inverted in Battle Royale as no one makes any vocal noise.
  • Played straight for most Battle Royale characters playable in Save the World.
• Taste the Rainbow: All four Hero classes come in both genders and four ethnicities, with each combination having his or her own name and usually a different mix of special abilities. The image above depicts A.C. (Shock Specialist - Outlander), Ken (Fleetfoot - Ninja), Ramirez (Rescue Trooper - Soldier) and Penny (Tank - Constructor).
• Top-Heavy Guy: The male characters from the Constructor and Soldier classes have relatively skinny legs compared to the rest of their bodies. And of course, the Smashers.
  Female Ninja spotting a Smasher: TINY-FOOTED WALL PUNCHER!!!

Save the World

• 10-Minute Retirement: In the Canny Valley campaign, the Storm King committing Mind Rape on several characters leads to Penny deciding she's going to pack up and move back to England. That's right, you can opt out of the apocalypse.
• 20 Bear Asses: Most of the campaign quests fall into this category - unique to Fortnite is how you can spread it across several missions, as each mission has its own objective that must be fulfilled to "save" campaign progress. Only got ten bear asses? Better build those radar towers anyway or you're gonna hunt them down all over again. Some missions lampshade on the ridiculousness of specific bear asses.
  Carlos: A round of Jefe, winner takes all.
  Lars: A round of Jefe, loser must fall.
  Ray: Do you have any cards or... Alright, we'll find cards.
• Action Bomb: Sploders, aka Husky Husks carrying propane tanks on their shoulder. Conveniently double as Red Shirts, VERY prone to friendly fire.
• Advancing Wall of Doom: The Resupply, Eliminate & Collect, and the updated Retrieve the Data missions has a storm that slowly closes in on the players not unlike the one from Battle Royale. For the former two, the storm circle moves all over the zone; the latter mission has the safe zone shrink around the weather balloon.
• Aerith and Bob: The rock band Steel Wool is comprised of Lars, Syd, Carlos and Anthony.
• After the End: The Storm already killed 98% of the human population. Society as you know it is done. Your job is to take that surviving 2% and kick the Storm to the curb so humanity can start rebuilding.
• Always Accurate Attack: The Blasters and Zapper Husks will always hit the targeting player unless one has taken cover.
• And the Adventure Continues: Stonewood, Plankerton, and Canny Valley make up the main "Stand and Fight" campaign. Twine Peaks onward revolves around the heroes fighting back in full force.
• Applied Phlebotinum: BluGlo, which is used to power various machines in the field. As stated by Dennis:
  Dennis: Oh, so you mean like how BluGlo works because it does?
• Artifact Title: Even before Battle Royale was added, the name Fortnite was based on the idea of making a fort at daylight and defending it when nighttime comes. In Save the World, not only are the Husks fought at any time of the day, but most missions have the fort defense started by yourself rather by time. The "Survive the Storm" event involved the "Build by day, defend by night" design and even included a 14 day mode, but was cut down to 7 on its return due to it taking too long to finish (upwards of 4+ hours)
• Artificial Stupidity: For most defence missions, simply building a big box around the objective with a single door and lining it with chest high walls barring a single gap infront of the door, and then lining the gap with traps, tends to work 90% of the time, as the AI will almost always cause the Husks to rush at the door, rather than find a way around, making large swaths of the assault into easy pickings.
• Attractive Zombie: Lars and Penny get unwillingly attracted to a Lobber and a Standard Husk respectively. Penny in particular admits that "Rarnold" is the not the most embarrassing "ex" she had.
• Axes at School: One good place to find ammo boxes is suburban playgrounds. Think about that for a minute.
• Ax-Crazy: Crackshot takes his holiday spirit very seriously. Although he admits he's manic all the time, his unremovable nutcracker costume has greatly impacted his insanity due to the lack of oxygen in his brain. He freaks out when an air hole was installed and promptly clogs it back since he's dedicated into living his deranged life forever.
• Apocalypse How: Class 3
• Back from the Dead: Dr. Vinderman copied his memories into See-Bot before his fatal experiment. The A.I. Vinderman helps Homebase after he's been accessed.
• Badass Boast: When Willow expresses doubt as to if Homebase can defeat the evil at the Haunted Hotel, Dennis tells her that they broke time last week on accident, so imagine what they could do on purpose.
• Beam Spam: The Blaster mist monsters attack by shooting a burst of energy beams from their mouths.
• Bears Are Bad News: TEDDY, summoned by most Outlanders (with the exception of Shock Specialist and Vanguard), is a robotic turret in the shape of a huge metal teddy bear.
  TEDDY: I AM A BEAR. YOU ARE NOT A BEAR.
• Bee-Bee Gun: The Beehive Husks can keep bees swarming around their own heads and attack heroes who come too close. And when Beehive husks fall, they can leave the bees around where they die for an area-denial attack.
• Beethoven Was an Alien Spy:
  • Invoked with the legend of Blackboot Ayers, who is heavily implied to be the original gunslinger Husk.
  • According to Fortnitemares, the vampire Vlad was really an aberrant Taker with life-drain powers.
• Better than a Bare Bulb: Later updates have conversations relating to the Early-Installment Weirdness the game had during its initial months and pointing out any character quirks.
• Black Comedy: The game is full of quips surrounding the ridiculous dark aspects of the storm, characters, and location histories.
• Body Horror: Zombie characteristics aside, a defining trait of the Husks are their skulls fully out of their mouths with their stretched faces used as hoodies.
• Boss-Only Level: The Storm King in Canny Valley.
• Breakable Weapons:
  • All weapons have a Durability stat that decays over usage (higher quality schematics are more durable but require more materials). Once the weapon's durability gauge is depleted, it breaks down completely (although if a player recycles it before it happens, they can get back a portion of crafting materials). Players can pick a "+% Longer Durability" perk which reduces the durability decay rate per shot.
    "Weapons don't last forever. Keep a spare at all times!"
  • Traps have a Durability stat as well; it indicates how many times the trap can trigger before disappearing from the mounting surface. It can be increased by slotting survivors with the appropriate set bonus, and there can be a "+% Max Durability" perk on the schematic itself as well.
• Brick Joke When Ray sees a Husk floating in space after the tutorial mission, she immediately says they'll take care of it later. The cutscene after finishing Canny Valley shows that the Husk is still alive and flailing about.
• Brown Note: The Husks hate the sounds of Steel Wool's soundtrack. Lars and Ray place large audio speakers in Plankerton to amplify the noise.
• Burger Fool: Dennis is designed as one, but eventually subverts it as his burger cooking experience makes him a much needed Team Chef. As a playable hero he's bumped up to Chef of Iron.
• Calling Your Attacks: The Ninjas, which actually gets lampshaded during the Love Storm event.
• Calvinball: The game of "Jefe" (Spanish for "Boss") revolves two players placing down one card per round... and that's about how much the rules work. Any card (playing cards, business cards, instruction cards, etc.) will do and there's no limit on the number of cards in a deck.
• The Cameo: One of the lead survivors is Malcolm from Unreal Tournament.
• Chest Monster: Mimics. Apparently some treasure chests finally got pissed off by being constantly ransacked by Outlanders (especially by those with a Keen(er) Eyes perk).
• Cliché Storm: invokedThe Blockbuster questline is all about this, from treating the meteor from Battle Royale as a masssive crisis to Lok pulling an Avengers Assemble, and even Sanitary Jack representing The Real Heroes.
• Death Trap: You can set traps to help defend areas. This is arguably a better way to kill husks than shooting them, even more so if you play as a Machinist constructor whose kit is explicitly geared towards it.
• Demonic Possession: The Storm King is able to possess humans. Ray produces reverse tin-foil hats (as the standard are useless) and places them onto scarecrows to redirect the Storm King's priorities onto it.
• Departmentof Redundancy Department: When you complete a Retrieve the Data mission.
  Ray: Praiseworthy job, Commander, so... good... job.
• Desperately Looking for a Purpose in Life: Dennis in Canny Valley Act 3 gets moody over the fact that he's nothing than just a Durr Burger employee. He later softens up when he successfully reunites Steel Wool and relieves Homebase from the Nothing.
• Destructive Savior : To literally save the world, you'll have to destroy a lot of property and salvage raw materials from it with many swings of your trusty pickaxe to build weapons, traps and fortification materials.
• The Ditz: Dennis and Anthony to the chagrin from everyone.
• Disc-One Nuke: The Light Sword class weapons, find one early on that is Rare tier or above, and it devastates enemies, really only needing to use a ranged weapon to clear out the enemies that use ranged attacks or inadvisable to approach such as Beehive Husks.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?:
  • During the Canny Valley campaign, the Base realizes that there's a radio show smearing their reputation and decrying the alien storm as a hoax, even calling the husks "crisis actors". Then Ray finds out that he's sponsored by people like Dennis and Clip.
  Ray: Why would you agree to become his sponsor?!
  Clip: His listeners really like guns!
  • One of the Blasted Badlands quests has the Major, the only NPC that's actually been in the military, send you out to get barrels of oil. Director is the first to see it:
  Director: Thank you for bringing democracy to the husks. (Beat) And taking all their oil.
• Double Jump: Standard Ninja ability, called the Mantis Leap.
• Drill Sergeant Nasty: The Major ends up filling this role, despite not actually being a sergeant.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Kevin the Cube from Season 5 and 6 of Battle Royale makes its Save the World appearance in Season 7 as residue from defeating the Storm King.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: The Blockbuster questline takes up to 11 pages of missions, when most of the recent ones manage about 3 or 4, and to save time they didn't have voiceovers for the beginning and ending of each mission at the time.
• Eldritch Abomination: The Mist Monsters, the in-game challenge to kill them even calls itself this trope.
• Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors:
  • Fire beats Nature and Wood (weapons/abilities deal full damage against Nature, 75% against itself and 25% against Water; husks deal increased damage against wooden structures)
  • Water beats Fire and Stone (weapons/abilities deal full damage against Fire, 75% against itself and 25% against Nature; husks deal increased damage against stone structures)
  • Nature beats Water and Metal (weapons/abilities deal full damage against Water, 75% against itself and 25% against Fire; husks deal increased damage against metal structures)
  • Physical is good against itself only (weapons/abilities deal full damage against non-elemental enemies and 50% against any element)
  • Energy is an all-rounder oddball (weapons/abilities deal 75% damage against any element and full damage against non-elemental enemies)
• Escort Mission: The "Retrieve the Bomb" mission has the players set a track from the bomb to the launcher and defending the moving bomb from the spawning Husks.
• Fake Longevity:
  • The majority of the game is grinding for materials, Hero XP, Schematic XP, and Survivor XP in order to handle the higher Power Level missions. There's also the rarities that greatly affect the power of a Hero, Defender, Schematic, and Survivor. Schematics also have random perks, and these require Re-Perks in order to change to something more suitable.
  • The campaign is mostly comprised of collecting certain objects which can take more than one zone to complete. This gets egregious after the fight with Blackboot Ayers where most storyline quests must be done in the Ghost Town zones.
• Flaming Hair: The Lobber Husks.
• Fun with Acronyms: The F.O.R.T. stats: Fortitude, Offense, Resistance, and Tech.
• The Gunslinger: Some heroes utilize pistols (and/or SMGs) more efficiently than others. Namely:
  • Ranger Deadeye (Outlander) offers damage increase to pistols/SMGs.
  • Beetlejess (Outlander) offers critical rating increase.
  • Quickdraw Calamity (Soldier) is a more traditional example who specs into six shooters specifically (first six shots deal greater damage and impact).
  • Of a more recent addition, Buccaneer Jonesy (Soldier) deals increased damage with pistols over 6 seconds after hitting an enemy with a sword.
  • On that note, starting from 2018's Blockbuster event, some Soldiers boast Lefty and Righty, an ability similar to Goin' Commando!!! in a sense. Upon activating, a hero in question (including but not limited to Calamity mentioned above) whips up dual pistols with seemingly Bottomless Magazines for a short while. Some heroes leverage this ability to ridiculous effect.
    • Carbide, for example, uses Space Pistols in place of the regular ones; those deal Energy damage, and their shots bounce off walls.
    • Raven's variant of this ability uses explosive ammo.
• Heroic BSoD: Appropriate for a robot character, but Ray suffers a minor version of this when Dr. Vinderman, who she considers her best friend and creator, seems to be dead. She simply can't accept the idea that he died in a mere lab accident, he was always ahead of the game, as far as she claims. She's proven right when it turns out he's in Canny Valley.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Ray decides take one for the team despite various protests. She's very adamant about it all throughout the story until the fight with the Storm King where Desiree shoves everyone out of the Rift and activates the bomb herself.
• Hold the Line: There are defense missions where you have to build forts around certain machines (like an ATLAS laser aimed for the sky or a supply drop of computer data) and use weapons and/or traps to hold off advancing monsters hell-bent on destroying what you're protecting until a time limit or kill limit is reached.
• Inconsistent Spelling: Ray is sometimes spelled as "RaY" in certain text boxes. She takes notice of this in one Canny Valley mission related to "reality hiccups".
• Ink-Suit Actor: Invoked - Ray, voiced by Ashly Burch, is just a floating thing with arms, but apparently she draws all her inspiration from one of Dr Vinderman's assistants, Desiree - who resembles Ashly Burch.
• In-Series Nickname: Lars commonly calls Ray "Little Robot". In a more serious note, Ray's original name is simply "17" according to Desiree. By the end of Canny Valley, Desiree is glad that Ray took her name with more use than what she had.
• Interface Screw: The "Timeless" questline is about the fallout from the previous time-jolting story, where our heroes apparently "broke time", which causes the sun's position in the sky to shoot up and down, tripping between day and night regardless of actual time passage. Timed missions still proceed as normal though, and the "screw" part really kicks in when certain abilities like Dire running faster at night activate ''when it's not nighttime".
• It Can Think: Implied. The Storm (or the husks themselves if they are some kind of hive mind) is implied to be intelligent and capable of recognizing priority targets that need to be destroyed. This is especially apparent at the last stage of a "repair the shelter" mission when Ray notes that the husks are regrouping and seem to know that the final shelter module is being installed, and that it's their last chance to attack before the shelter becomes fully operational.
• Late-Arrival Spoiler:
  • All the seasonal events are supposedly set after the main campaign and Canny Valley in particular, and you hear Ray and some heroes and NPCs like the Major, Clip and even Dennis, but Desiree is conspicuously absent. The "Timeless" questline is the worst offender, with Ray going back to try and undo Desiree's Heroic Sacrifice regardless of your actual campaign progress!
  • Reviving the classic Blockbuster questline in 2020 inevitably leads to this.
• Level Scaling: The Husks and Mist Monsters deal more damage and have more health the higher the power level is on a mission.
• Lightning Bruiser:
  • The Takers move all over the place, phase through walls, and deal the heaviest damage (especially if the mission's power level is amped to the ridiculous numbers where even one of those can AND WILL one-shot anyone in the team, if last year's Frostnite is of any indication). They also have the lowest health among the Mist Monsters.
  • On the player's side, Ninjas are extremely mobile, and have powerful combat abilities such as Dragon Slash and Kunai Storm, but, like aforementioned Takers, have the lowest health and shield of any playable class.
• Made of Indestructium: The weather balloon in the Retrieve the Data missions - the balloon part can be shot apart, but the data collection apparatus can somehow remain intact from falling several stories, and whatever houses the data is still intact. Until the husks get to it...
• The Man They Couldn't Hang: The legend of Blackboot Ayers in Canny Valley, who supposedly suffered from "chronic gallows neck", and apparently couldn't look upwards, or to the sides.
• Mook Maker: The Flingers spawn Husks and throws them on top of the defending unit. To a larger extent, the Storm King creates the Husks from mist.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Thinking that SEE-Bot is broken, Ray has him sent out in the desert with no apparent way to find him. Turns out, the SEE-Bot has Dr. Vinderman's consciousness. Desiree is not amused when she finds out.
• No Indoor Voice: Kyle and the constructors that share his voice.
• No Party Like a Donner Party: Canny Valley's name comes from a failed expedition in the valley that resulted in resorting to cannibalism between team members for survival. Of course, Ray wants to end discussion by saying its name came from a can.
• Not Quite Flight: Takers apparently have a huge advantage with their ability to hover off the ground... except that they're clearly following ground elevations when they move, with their diving attack being the only way they can go around it, like the huskings' jump attack.
• Oblivious to Love: In the "Love Storm" event, Sarah and Jonesy willingly travel to Hexylvania to find out whether they're in love or it's just the Lobbers' love bombs at work. They overdose on ten vials (instead of the recommended two drops) of Hate Potion until they start loathing the concept of love. Ray and Dennis keep pointing out to the two that they are still hand-holding and having romantic conversations despite constant denials.
• Obvious Rule Patch:
  • To prevent AFK farming, the Supply Crate gadget can't be used in the safe pre-mission state of a Storm Shield map.
  • Although not as obvious as it took two years to implement, players who can access Save the World by game sharing (commonly on Xbox) will earn X-Ray Tickets instead of V-Bucks. Only players who bought access can earn V-Bucks.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: Most of the heroes are vocally called by their nickname. Cassie Lipman insists to be called "Clip" rather than her real name.
• Only Sane Man:
  • Director Riggs in most of the conversations tends to take the character's oddities in stride, although he's also the Comically Serious. Then you get to the quest which puts the Director in the Survivors menu... and it turns out that your faceless Commander was the only sane man the whole time.
  Ray: (when you recover a box of "office supplies") What is this? A box full of sticks?
  Director Riggs: I'm not a "carrot" kind of person.
  • Desiree is the one who takes the whole Storm very seriously. She chides others from goofing off.
• Only Six Faces: Some of your Defenders (who can be deployed in the field) are a spitting image of some of the Survivors (those who the player rescues), despite both being completely separate people.
• Palette Swap: Vlad in the "Fortnitemares" event is a white colored Taker.
• The Power of Rock: The Boom Base ability applies Steel Wool music onto the Constructor's B.A.S.E. Anyone within the music's hearing range receives range weapon bonuses.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: Used in the title of an early quest in Plankerton ("No. Robot. Doctors."), which is said verbatim in its intro dialogue.
• Remember the New Guy?: With the inclusion of Major Oswald, Director Riggs, and Clip in the 6.30 update, the conversations are re-written to include their efforts in the story. For returning players, these are not played, so they just show up in the menu.
• Respawn on the Spot: You can revive yourself two times. Otherwise, you can be revived by an ally, or respawn at the starting location instead.
• The Right Hand of Doom:
  • The most distinguishing feature of the Smashers and Flingers are this.
  • Zapper Husks shoot lasers from their right hand's index finger.
• Roboteching: Razor from Battle Breakers is a ninja hero here, and her Kunai Storm behaves like this due to her Magitek origins - the daggers briefly pause in midair, likely to seek their targets, before raining down on them.
• Robot Girl: Ray. She's a robot and she's a girl, but, well, she's a floating sphere with arms, really. Also a heroic version of a Perky Female Minion.
• The Rock Star: Lars and the Steel Wool crew are retired rock-stars who can still play one hell of a tune, but their primary profession are rock-star scientists, one of the foremost experts on the Storm aside from Dr. Vinderman himself. Their old band's music is extremely popular amongst the survivors.
• Self-Parody: In early 2020, they added a secret quest that reuses the audio from Ned, the medkit guy... but it's coming out of a port-a-potty. The quest directs you to a pile of toilet paper just out of reach of it.
  "I know it's a lot to ask..."
• Separated by a Common Language: In the Canny Valley campaign, Penny meets up with her sister from England, Power Chord, and we learn that they have their own names for pretty much every thing to do with the storm.
  "Pitchers?... We call them cricket creepers."
• Shock and Awe: The Phase Scout, Recon Scout, Shock Specialist, Trailblaster, Trailblazer and Vanguard Outlanders can deploy shock towers that shoot chain lightning at approaching enemies. There are also ceiling- and wall-mounted electric traps.
• Taking You with Me: A Constructor's DECOY ability can do this. Aforementioned Sploders will also try to go suicidal on you once you get up close and personal with them or if something obstructs their pathing.
• Teleportation:
  • Unlike your standard zombie, husks are basically warped to where they need to be at any one time via the Storm. Where they're summoned is very often telegraphed by human-sized storm swirls, which are a good indicator of where incoming swarms will come from when you're planning a defense.
  • One of the gadgets are two teleport pods that can be placed on the ground at a constricted distance and anyone can use. Fired ammo and objects can be transferred through the teleporter by the player.
• Tin-Can Robot: See-Bot is a typical one, apart from being able to fold into a crate.
• The Smurfette Principle: While Homebase is one of the most equal-opportunity groups in fiction (even the robots have genders!), Lobbers and Mimics are the only female Husk variants.
• The Unintelligible:
  • All of the droids except for Ray, See-Bot, and later Lok speak in electronic sounds (explained in-universe as a "second language" for bots). Ray understands them perfectly while the others understand her English in equal manner.
  • Dire communicates with various dog and wolf noises, which Ray can somehow understand perfectly well.
• Trick Arrow: There's a wide array of bows just to mimic this ability, in lieu of being able to change the arrow type. Love Song makes a stun cloud; Vindertech Seeker splits into several arrows; Powder Keg makes a delayed explosion if it hits terrain; Vaccuum Tube Bow has a chain lighting effect; the popular Boom Bow from BR is also here, and many other effects. Stoneheart Farrah's perk also makes your intended target explode with more arrows to hit those around it.
• Video-Game Lives: A player starts a mission with three lives. Getting knocked down lets them resurrect on the spot costing one life, or let another player revive them for free. Losing all lives or falling off the map re-spawns the player back to the starting point (or to the nearest banner).
• Wall of Weapons: The Armory tab has your highest Power Level weapon of each type on the pegboard wall.
• Wham Episode: You finally discover the Vindertech research lab in Plankerton, and head out to find Dr. Vinderman, the one person who might be able to shut down the Storm once and for all. Except a chunk of his lab is a literal smoking crater, the good Doctor is nowhere to be found, and the approach to his lab is heralded by a confusing message to Ray from the Doc telling her to "find Ray". The data you recover from the lab is a message from the Doctor with him saying "if you're hearing this, I'm probably dead", but with a message of encouragement telling the Commander that he was chosen specifically for the job and that as long as they press on, the world can be saved.
• What Happened to the Mouse?:
  • Most of Ramirez's dialogue is replaced by Major Oswald. This retcons a storyline where Ramirez is worried about her family's state.
• What the Hell, Player?: Downplayed. The heroes will remark a "You serious?" to the player whenever one tries to make them do something else (such as trying to reload when they're editing).
• Wham Line: "I see... Canny Valley. I see the true Ray. I see the Doctor. I see WAR."
• Whole-Plot Reference: The Valor questline has Major Oswald going stir crazy and running off into the storm, and Ray has to find Val, one of the elite soldiers he trained, to reach out to him. Basically The Hunted (2003) in reverse.
• You Have to Believe Me!: The "Tales from Beyond" event. Lok is found damaged and claims to have seen a monster near Homebase, but due to his condition even Ray has problems believing him. Turns out it was a 2-fort version of Kevin from Battle Royale.
• Your Head Asplode: Get a good enough headshot on a husk, and you'll briefly see the husk with an empty hoodie before it dissipates.
• Zeerust: The Retro Scifi heroes and weapons introduced in "Beyond the Stellar Horizon".
• Zerg Rush: All Husks will target a single entity and use their attacks in full force.

Battle Royale

• A Taste of Power:
  • Starting the game in Chapter 2 for the first time makes the game playing "Ruckus" by Konata Small, as well as making all other enemies bots.
  • Chapter 2 Season 6 starts with Jones recruiting you to help him seal the Zero Point, all while reality ripples start ravaging the island... by turning you into some of the new Battle Pass skins one after another.
• Added Alliterative Appeal: The names of locations (Sweaty Sands, Misty Meadows, etc.).
• Advancing Wall of Doom: The storm continuously encroaches on the island, with players who get caught up in it taking continuous damage. If the match goes on for too long, the storm eye will shrink away to nothing, leaving the island completely covered by the storm.
• All for Nothing: After a small meteor struck one of the buildings in Tilted Towers during Season 4 and destroyed it, Season 5 saw the slow reconstruction of a new building where the old one stood. Towards the end of the season, it was finally completed, only for the cube to crush it in Season 5's last week.
• All Hail the Great God Mickey!: About halfway through Season 5, the Tomatohead reappeared... with an entire temple dedicated to it, covered in tribal markings and now worshiped by what seem to be tribal cultists wearing Pizza Pit uniforms that perform a strange ritual which involves dropping a large tomato on their heads. The structures and markings found around the temple imply that the Tomatohead was sent to the past, where it was promptly worshiped as some sort of deity.
• All the Worlds Are a Stage: Season X's map slowly evolved into this, evolving into an island featuring landmarks, points of interest, and gimmicks from every season that came before it.
• Alternate Reality Game: Leading up to Season 5, a rift consumed the giant Durr Burger mascot in Greasy Grove and was later found in the middle of the Californian desert next to the car Fortnite's police cars are modeled after. An agent was stationed nearby which gave out a phone number that, in conjunction with several other audio signals distributed during the ARG, revealed the location of both the remaining rifts and several Loot Llamas placed all over Europe. Upon Season 5's release, the mascot was "returned" to the world of Fortnite, taking Drift and the All-Terrain Kart with it as well.
  • It should be noted, however, that the disappearance of the other props on the map were speculated to be a Red Herring; the agent dropped a book conveniently opened to a page where they had circled several letters in pen spelling "nothing."
  • The Season 4 prelude subverted this with a Red Herring as well. When attempting to make a spectrogram of the ambient noise produced by the large meteor, it would simply display the frames for the "Take the L" dance.
• An Arm and a Leg: During the Final Showdown event in Season 9, Mecha Team Leader loses its arm while the monster tears it apart.
• Anti-Frustration Features: Starting with the Marshmello concert, real-time scheduled events disable weapons, and while pickaxes can still be swung, they deal no damage to players, preventing griefers from ruining your fun while you watch. Fall damage is also disabled.
• Apocalypse How: Season X's ending is a Class X-4, as the Visitor's attack on the Zero-Point to resolve the growing danger of a Time Crash causes it to collapse into a singularity that then absorbs the entire Fortnite universe and the game itself plus all official real-world outlets on social media and the internet, leaving behind only a black hole. Fortunately, the attack is also seemingly a Reset Button of sorts, meaning that a new universe will rise from the ashes assuming his gambit pays off.
• Arc Symbol: Butterflies, often seen alongside rifts.
• Arc Words: Ever since Season 5, the term "Order must be restored" or variations thereof, have been showing up in a lot of the more plot related images.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: Shields don't protect players from stink bombs, fall damage, fire damage, and storm damage.
• Arrows on Fire: Chapter 2 Season 6's loot pool contains the Primal Flame Bow, which fire flaming arrows.
• The Artifact:
  • Several things that were relevant for the per-Season weekly challenges still remain long after those challenges and Seasons end. "Dance in different forbidden locations" (in front of "No Dancing" signs) was a weekly mission in Season 3, but the signs were never removed, and some were even added, including one in Paradise Palms in Season 5, but the mission didn't return until Season 7 with new signs entirely; "Score a goal on 5 different pitches." was a Season 4 mission coinciding with the 2018 World Cup, but the homemade soccer fields persisted past the Season end; "Shoot 5 Clay Pigeons at different locations" appeared in Season 5 and the machines remained for some time afterwards. Occasionally some of these items become relevant again in later season challenges.
  • A lot of stuff originally from Save the World completely loses any context in Battle Royale - anything to do with the Storm and Vindertech, for example, along with leftover images of Husks.
• Artificial Stupidity: Hijacking a tank without killing the IO soldiers manning the turrets will lead them shooting the tank they are currently on, trying to kill the player in the driver's seat.
• Ascended Meme:
  • The "Orange Justice" emote from the Season 4 Battle Pass, a dance based on a Boogie Down contestant’s entry. The video went viral, resulting in the “Justice For Orange Kid” movement after he lost the contest.
  • YouTuber Muselk posted a video where he attempted to rescue an enemy player named Chaperdoodle who was stuck in a low location on the map, below the build limit (where you can't build anymore) because he seemed nice enough. Due to the build limit being too low, Muselk attempted to bring an ATK down so they could bounce off of the roof to reach the staircase he had built, but in the process he accidentally hit Chaperdoodle with the ATK and sent him careening off the edge. Epic loved the video so much that they retweeted it and memorialized it ingame with a tombstone for Chaperdoodle and a set of bouncy tires to allow anyone that falls down there and has materials to build their way back up.
  • invokedThe Fortnite subreddit named the Cube "Kevin" to get around an automod filter. After the November 4th, 2018 Cube explosion event, Epic put in some limited-time challenges with the reward of a Back Bling named "Lil' Kev", which is a piece of the exploded Cube. Taken further in Chapter 2 with Steamy Stacks, a power plant named Kevolution Energy which is themed around the cube.
• Attack Its Weak Point: The Food Fight LTM places emphasis on defense as each side guards the mascot head on the top of their restaurant. It's actually a pretty large target that you can get to with just the Hand Cannon if you play your cards right.
• Automatic New Game: Opening the game after the Chapter 2 Season 1 update would lead into an introductory cutscene which ended with Jonesy dropping from the Battle Bus... into an actual Solos match.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • Ironically, building huge forts from whole cloth is this. You'd need to mine the necessary materials, and then build whatever you want, all while at the risk of being spotted and shot down by enemies who happen to be nearby, with that big thing under construction being a blatant giveaway that there's someone waiting to be killed. And even once your dream fort is done and fortified to withstand an enemy assault, there's the high possibility that it'll get swallowed up by the storm anyway, rendering your efforts moot. Big forts see a bit more use in 50v50 and other large-team modes, where each team has clearly-marked sides and can help protect teammates on the frontlines.
  • Port-a-Forts. Placing one on the ground creates a big tower made of metal that you can climb up and snipe from, with the flared roof giving you cover. But seeing a Port-a-Fort suddenly spawn is a sure giveaway that someone is there, making them more likely to be killed with a sneak attack. Again, they're more useful in 50v50 and other large team modes, where stealth is less of a priority.
• A Winner Is You: If you or your team manages to be the last one(s) standing, all you'll see is just the message "#1 Victory Royale!"
• Bad Santa: Season 7 introduces Sgt. Winter, a musclebound Santa-like fellow whose idea of a greeting is riding a big ice wave onto the island while brandishing a BFS and commanding an army with airplanes. He also carries a pistol on him at all times and pilots a sleigh loaded with missiles.
• Balloonacy: Introduced in November 2018 are packs of balloons that you can somehow inflate despite them not providing a gas tank. One or two will increase your jump height and act against gravity, usually^note A single balloon, deployed before you start falling, is always sufficient to negate fall damage. Deployed while falling, it might not slow you down fast enough. negating fall damage. A third will lift you right off the ground.
• Battle Royale Game: 100 players (optionally grouped up into teams of two, three or four) drop onto an island and are tasked with seeking out weapons and eliminating each other. Last one standing wins.
• Bear Hug: A synced emote added in Chapter 2 Season 7.
• BFS: The Infinity Blade, initially wielded by Sgt. Winter in the Season 7 opening, became an item that spawns in Polar Peak 5 days after the Season started. It's a three-hit kill on the regular swing and has a huge jumpslash, both of which eat through builds as well.
  • It's revealed that the statue at Neo Tilted is actually a handle for the sword of the Mecha Team Leader during the Final Showdown, and it put everything before it to shame.
• Black Bead Eyes: Some outfits, such as Jellie, Meowscles and Guff, have this, plus the creature glider Ollie.
• Blatant Burglar: The Scoundrel (male) and Rapscallion (female) outfits, which both come with black pants and shoes, a black and white striped shirt, a Domino Mask, and a black beanie.
• Bloodless Carnage: No blood or bruises come out of the person's body after they have been shot or exploded. When one is eliminated, they are teleported out of the island.
• Body Armor as Hit Points: Shields can protect the player's health from enemy attacks, though they don't reduce fall, storm or burn damage.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • Wood constructs may not be as durable as stone or metal, but they build the fastest and material for them is by far the most common. Even a single wooden wall can spell the difference between life and death; as long as it has any health left, it can stop a hit that would've otherwise killed you.
  • Ammo boxes may not have the useful support items and weapons that chests and supply crates carry, but they're always worth looting to keep your weapons stocked.
• Book Ends:
  • Season 4 starts and ends with the arrival of someone Trapped in Another World; the Visitor (who was inside the meteor that turned Dusty Depot into Dusty Divot) in the beginning, and Drift (who was warped from the real world to the Fortnite-verse along with the Durer Burger head) in the end.
  • Chapter 1's story as a whole both started and ended with a meteor crashing down onto the island.
  • Chapter 2 Season 7's map reverts almost all the changes made because of the Zero Point's reality waves and rifts, making it similar to how it looked at the start of the chapter. For example, Corny Complex is Frenzy Farm again, except now with an underground base housing the I.O.
• Celestial Body: The "Galaxy" costume, one of the default male outfits, gives the character it's applied to an indigo-to-violet gradient palette dotted with stars, with tow addition lights orbiting around the head.
• Changing Gameplay Priorities:
  • Although killing people is still the primary focus, some of the weekly missions require you to do out-of-the-way things including finding and deciphering maps that lead to Battle Stars, testing your knowledge of map landmarks with a goal to search between 3 objects, locating a series of random objects like rubber ducks or garden gnomes, or (in Season 4) dancing together with 3 other people to lift up a disco ball.
  • Season 5 changes the dirt racetrack on the east side of the map to a modern black tar raceway that golf carts frequently spawn at. The racetrack comes with a starting line that will time how fast you complete a lap around the course.
• The Cameo: Wreck-It-Ralph appears in Risky Reels' theater screen quickly running in and waving at the player before leaving. The free "Hot Marat" emote is based on a dance from the film.
• Captain Ersatz: Quite a number of skins were intended as alternate versions of actual superheroes and other characters, before official tie-ins led to official versions getting into the game.
  • The Rust Lord was intended as Star Lord before the Avengers: Endgame tie-in allowed them to do a proper one (but still heavily redesigned).
  • Similarly, the Reaper was one for John Wick until the official LTM, though this official John Wick was barely distinguishable from Reaper at a glance.
  • Once more, after years of comparing Zoe to Suicide Squad (2016)'s portrayal of Harley Quinn, the exact same portrayal came to the game to tie in with Birds of Prey (2020) (though by default she reps BoP, her Suicide Squad costume is an unlockable style).
• Character Customization: The game has granted more customization to players as time passes. As of Season 7, you can change characters (with several outfits having selectable variations and some, like Calamity and Lynx, even having multiple groups of selections), your Back Bling (a cosmetic item you can wear on your back), your pickaxe, your glider, the contrail that appears when you skydive, the emotes you have on your quick menu, an icon that you use, and alternate skins (Wraps) for your weapons and vehicles.
  • This was taken up to eleven in Chapter 2, Season 2 with the battle pass skin Gear Specialist Maya. by completing challenges, you unlock the ability to customize her hair, vest, helmet, tattoos, and more facets of her outfit, with 3.8 million unique combinations.
• Cliffhanger: The end of the Operation: Skyfire event in Chapter 2 Season 7. Dr Slone has shanghaiied all the players into her ploy to destroy the alien mothership - before revealing that they were all going to be sacrificed along with it. You still find your own way out, and get flung out of the mothership as it starts coming apart... only for a downed abductor to crash into you. Cue 12 hours of server downtime.
• Clown Car: The Battle Bus holds up to 100 combatants. A standard American school bus, which makes up the primary component of the Battle Bus, can seat up to roughly 60 adult passengers. Granted, it's likely that the remaining combatants are standing inside the bus or sitting on its floor, but especially considering that they're carrying pickaxes, gliders, and optional Back Bling, that bus is practically a pocket dimension. Averted in 50v50, Final Fight, and Team Rumble where each team has its own Battle Bus and each team consists of a more bus-accomodatable 50 players in the former mode and 20 players in the latter two. Regardless, entrants are able to exit the two-door bus at an indefinitely fast rate at any time during the disembarking period.
• Controllable Helplessness: If your character reaches 0 health while playing Duos, Trios or Squads (but not on Team Rumble), they'll be knocked down and can only crawl slowly until their second health bar runs out, are revived, or if all squad members get knocked down.
• Cosmetic Award: Technically, all of the rewards you can earn by leveling up your passes are simply cosmetic items that offer no gameplay advantage. In practice, some character skins are highly sought after by players for their camouflage properties, such as very dark skins (for hiding in shadows) or medium-green skins (for blending in the foliage).
  • There's also the umbrella, which is only given for a Victory Royale in either Solo, Duos, Trios, or Squads (the game isn't just going to let you easily grab one by doing Team Rumble or other large team modes).
• Covert Group: The Imagined Order operated secretly from the public up until Chapter 2 Season 5.
• Critical Existence Failure: An interesting case applies to buildings: when part of a building is disconnected completely from the ground, that part will abruptly self-destruct, leaving behind no debris or even construction materials. For best results, try this on one of the hi-rises in Tilted Towers. Tall apartment complex whose first floor has been reduced to a single support beam? Subsequent floors stay in place perfectly fine. But as soon as that support beam gets destroyed? The whole thing vanishes, possibly sending occupants in the highest floors to death by fall damage.
• Crossover:
  • There was one with Avengers: Infinity War in May 2018. The limited-time event adds a new mode called 'Infinity Gauntlet Limited Time Mashup' where the Infinity Gauntlet randomly spawns on the map. Pick it up to become Thanos, and make the other players suffer.
  • A similar mode appeared in 2019 to tie in with Avengers: Endgame, with players divided into either playing as Thanos and his Outriders or the players with various Avengers weapons.
  • June 2019 also had a crossover with John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum, where players tried to eliminate each other to collect Bounties. The Continental Hotel and John Wick's house also appeared on the map.
  • Also in 2019, Mega Mall included a Scoops Ahoy ice cream shop from Stranger Things, with portals appearing around the area for a short time, coinciding with the release of limited edition skins based on the series.
  • In August 2019, there was a crossover event with Borderlands 3, featuring a Pandora-themed area with an Art Shift to the series' cel-shaded graphics, a Psycho skin and Claptrap backpack, sprays based on Tiny Tina's rabbit logo and a Psycho mask, a Vault Symbol icon, and themed weapon skins.
  • In August 2020, Thor dropped in for a visit, which is considered canon to Thor, which saw the God of Thunder become a Herald of Galactus.
  • And that's not even mentioning the crossovers with Star Wars, Street Fighter, Dragon Ball, and others...
• Cute Monster: An update in Chapter 3 Season 1 introduces Klombos, which are massive, extremely hard to hurt creatures that can tear down structures just by walking through them, but are also completely passive unless you attack them, lumbering about aimlessly, and have charming, wide-eyed faces. They also react with utter happiness if they spot a Klomberry, their favorite food, when thrown out by a player.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!: An experimental update allowed players to re-deploy their Gliders after jumping from high places, but was removed from main game modes a few weeks later after poor reception. A lot of people died of fall damage in the days immediately following the second patch.
  • The start of Chapter 3 Season 2 removed building from main modes, which had been a core mechanic of the game since day 1. This put some players reliant on building into situations where they would try to build cover, but couldn't.
• Deliberate Under-Performance: One bizzare weekly challenge from Chapter 4 Season 1 tasks you with finishing anywhere in a match but first place, meaning that players must avoid winning a match in order to progress and complete this challenge.
  Challenge Description: Winning isn't everything... right?
• Die, Chair, Die!:
  • After the terrain itself, the majority of the scenery is essentially variously-shaped collision boxes that you can smash for materials. Taken amusingly literally with a Season 7 challenge tasking the player to destroy 80 chairs.
  • For several Seasons, the southeast corner of the map features a house with sofa chairs blocking the doorways and windows. More chairs appeared in each season, requiring players to destroy them just to enter the building.
• Do Not Touch the Funnel Cloud: The floating island of Season 6. Think about it, a tornado strong enough to lift an island should probably affect people a lot easier than that...
• Drone of Dread: The T-pose emote has these as its music, but it eventually slows down to a halt as the user tires out, but regains as the user goes back to the pose.
• Dual Wielding: There are harvesting tools that comprise of two smaller axes, with one held in each hand. They are swung one at a time, but have identical damage and attack speed as single, two-handed ones.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Putting aside the seasonal skins (Halloween and Christmas-themed such as Ghoul Trooper), most of the early outfits were regular humans with military clothing. A couple of years later, this seems strange considering that weird skins like Tomato Head, Peely, and crossover Guest Fighters have become iconic to the playerbase and even outsiders.
• Easter Egg: Dabbing continuously for 15 seconds using the “Infinite Dab” emote will cause the accompanying music to become bass boosted and heavily distorted.
• Elite Mook: The elite cube fiend, which somehow still isn't as elite as the red and yellow-glowing ones. Hope you reloaded...
• Exact Words: Challenges that seem difficult on their face can sometimes be completed in non-obvious ways. "Deal damage while riding in a vehicle"? Doesn't say anyone has to be driving it. "Land at X location"? You certainly can do that at the start of the match... or after diving from a Launch Pad, Stormwing, or redeployed glider. "Deal damage to opponents"? Certainly doable on other players... or enemy NPCs and wildlife.
• Excuse Plot: There is an on-going story throughout each of the chapters and the game's lifespan, but most of it is either in extra lore snippets or external videos to justify The Looper and several recurring cast members and antagonists messing around with new hijinks per major update. The core of the game is so multiplayer-driven that one could very reasonably not even realize there is a plot. Certain chapters and portions of the game even outright omit story entirely or at least create a threadbare amount of it to justify new gameplay elements, like Chapter 5 brushing off even trying to explain a plot in favor of emphasizing other game modes.
• Expansion Pack World: New landmarks are added here and there, occasionally replacing old ones. Sometimes this is justified (the superhero mansion and villain base being crafted as movie sets in Season 4, the various structures that came about as a result of the rifts in Season 5), and sometimes it isn't (why did Anarchy Acres get replaced by a country club in Season 5 again? And where was Tilted Towers back before Season 3?).
• Expy: Several outfits are expies of many pop culture characters.
  • Carbide begins increasingly looking like Iron Man as he is upgraded.
  • Reaper is essentially John Wick.
  • Valor is basically an Indian version of Wonder Woman.
  • Zoey looks similar to Harley Quinn as she appears in Suicide Squad (2016).
  • Hybrid the Draconic Humanoid resembles Deadpool on his first stage.
  • Midas is something of a twofer - he's visually based on Le Chiffre but the hands turning gold are a Visual Pun for Goldfinger.
  • Skye is practically a female version of Finn the Human. Her Adventure Pack back bling even features a Cool Sword and a cute video game system, while Ollie fills the role of the shapeshifting non-human companion.
  • Brutus is pretty much Heavy Weapons Guy in a suit - he's usually deployed wielding a minigun, but his Ghost and Shadow looks mask his face to downplay it.
  • Big Chuggus is, amusingly, a Slurp juice-powered Bane.
  • Relaxed Fit Jonesy^note originally called Dad Bod Jonesy resembles Fat Thor from Avengers: Endgame.
• Failed a Spot Check: The "Down On The Ranch◊" loading screen description states that "Llamas keep escaping their pen for some strange reason." It probably has something to do with the man wearing an inflatable llama on his waist.
• Fisher Kingdom: During the Nexus War event, characters from the Marvel Universe find their memories fading once arriving on the island, quickly taking part in Battle Royale without any apparent reason. This is emphasized with the "Awakening" missions for each character skin, which is essentially performing tasks to jog their memories.
• Floating Continent:
  • Season 6 sees the primary center house part of Loot Lake lifting off into the air in a tornado and floating above the map. The tornado lifts players into the air and allows them to reopen their gliders to reach the island.
  • At some point Epic decided to take all the Season 6 playground minigames and stick them together in a bunch of connected floating platforms over Battle Royale island. Prepare to build like mad... or just grab those new balloons.
  • The entirety of Chapter 4 was build upon this, with the chapter's main island ("Asteria") being the stitched-together fragments of the previous islands floating in the cosmos.
• Flying on a Cloud: The Raz has the special Dream Stance emote which has him in the Levitating Lotus Position on a small cloud to fly along the world.
• Flying Car:
  • The Battle Bus is an improvised example, made out of a blue school bus with a hot air balloon attached to it.
  • In the "Getaway" mode, your goal is one of four white vans that's rigged up the same way as the Battle Bus.
• Follow the Chaos: Other than the noise of loud gunfire or footsteps, seeing a clutter of items and built structures outside of named locales signifies a battle has happened there already.
• The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You:
  • The rift that appeared in Season 4 as a result of the rocket launch warped several objects out of the Fortnite world. The Durr Burger head was taken to our world.
  • In Seasons 5 and 6, a giant cube appeared on the map and moved around (by rolling in Season 5 and flying in Season 6). Players who died to attacking it had their cause of death listed in the kill feed as a glitchy icon that rapidly changed between the mysterious symbols shown on the cube.
  • Season X's live event has the collapse of the Zero-Point and presumed Reset Button extend to the lobby, which shatters the backdrop, sucks in the user interface, distorts the initial alert regarding server instability leading up to the event, and outright prevents the game itself from starting properly, leaving only a black hole in its wake. Even Fortnite's social media pages, Trello board, and Epic's website weren't spared from this.
• Freemium: Downplayed with the Battle Pass. The Free Pass includes sparse rewards for every couple of tiers passed while the actual Battle Pass has a new reward per tier. Buying a Battle Pass gives the player all rewards from previous tiers and playing the game for a good amount time will net enough V-Bucks for the next season's Battle Pass. Also, none of the rewards have any gameplay benefits, so the only point is to make yourself stylish.
• Frictionless Ice:
  • The Chiller trap allows you to invoke this; anyone who stumbles upon it will have their feet encased in ice, causing them to slide around. The News bulletin for its arrival flat-out states it:
    Hello ice, goodbye friction!
  • Season 7 vaulted the Chiller and added a frozen area with icy lakes that have the same effect.
  • One of the LTMs for 14 Days of Fortnite was Slide, which gave this effect to everyone, all the time, plus an infinite Grappler to more easily exploit the ice physics.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: Drift was sucked into Fortnite from the real world when the Durr Burger mascot "returned" to the map. He starts improving his racing uniform, but immediately goes a different route afterwards and ends up dressing in an utterly demonic feudal Japan garb, to the point where his last evolution has his cloak emitting pink lightning. In a subversion, however, he remains friendly the whole time despite his menacing change of clothes.
• Funnel Cloud Journey: The Season 6 and Season X island tornado. Thanks to everyone getting their own gliders, it's possible to ride the tornado and either land on the floating island, or essentially re-deploy on a different part of the island below.
• G-Rated Drug: Unicorn Flakes.
• Gamer Chick: Lynx seems to be one, if her livestreaming setup in Frosty Flights is any indication.
  • Skye definitely counts, given her room in the lobby in Chapter 2, Season 2 and the fact that her Adventure Pack is visibly carrying a game console.
• Geo Effects: Slurpy Swamp of Chapter 2 appears to be a manufacturing plant for Slurp Juice and other shield-related consumables. The wastewater surrounding it glows blue and gradually increases your Shield when you take a dip in it.
  • When Kevin the Cube was still active, the seven runes it created around the island applied low gravity to anyone who got near, as well as Kevin itself. The runes also were the only place Shadow Stones could spawn.
• Gale-Force Sound: The Boombox item plays loud music that destroys buildings and structures within its area of effect.
• Giant Mook: Cube Brutes and Ice Brutes.
• Godzilla Threshold: The end of Chapter 2 event. In the face of an all-out invasion by the Last Reality, the Foundation's best plan to stop the Cube Queen is to drown her in the ocean by flipping the whole island on top of her.
• Go-Karting with Bowser: The cinematic trailer for Chapter 3 Season 3 features Darth Vader, one of the most famous villains in all of fiction...waiting in line for an amusement park ride and then promptly having fun riding it, though he does end up knocking Peely off the track in the process.
• Grenade Hot Potato: Shortly after the release of Dynamite, an interaction was added to throw it back. It has a fairly long fuse, so if your opponent is just tossing it willy-nilly in close quarters...
• "Groundhog Day" Loop: Lore details imply that every player character is stuck in "The Loop," which causes the events of the battle royale to happen over and over again. Multiple "snapshots" of different character populate the Loop, explaining the multiple instances of identical or similar player outfits as well as the existence of NPCs. What existed before the Loop started, what happens after it ends, and how Agent Jonesy and the Zero Point are involved, have yet to be explained.
• Guns Akimbo: One of the weapons you can equip is a pair of pistols that are fired together. Strangely, you can't just pick up two individual pistols and then fire them together or split the dual pistols off into individual weapons.
• Guest Fighter: Fortnite has featured a truly astonishing number of collaborations and promos from other media, primarily through unlockable skins. For the sake of space, they can be found in the crossovers section.
• Hand Cannon:
  • One of the available weapons is a pistol bearing this name. It has the highest per-shot damage of any pistol-class weapon in the game, but in turn it fires very slowly. It's also one of the loudest weapons available, in a game where stealth is the key to surviving as long as you can, except in large team modes where frontline-vs-frontline fights render stealth irrelevant.
  • A lesser example is the Dual Pistols. While not as strong as the Hand Cannon, the two pistols are still stronger than an Assault Rifle, and can deal a beefy 42 damage per shot. They were temporarily vaulted but later returned to the main game.
  • Season 8 introduced the Flintlock, which not only fires at an opponent, but is strong enough to push the shooter in the opposite direction of the blast. Some players use it as a rapid movement tool more than a weapon.
• Hitbox Dissonance: A common complaint among the playerbase is that the hitboxes for player-built structures are far too big, and they often block shots that seemed clean. This despite being the same game that lets you shoot through the gap between the bent slats of a garage door.
• Hit Stop:
  • In Season 5, the game started to dramatically slow down during the kill that ends the match.
  • Bearing in mind that this trope should not be possible in real time, it happens at the end of the Final Showdown event, in full view of all players before their match is over.
• Holiday Mode:
  • In addition to themed outfits that made debuts around the holidays they were made for (such as Chinese-themed outfits for the Chinese New Year and the Cuddle Team Leader for Valentine's Day), certain holidays also bring changes with them, typically including a weapon swap (Halloween brought with it a Jack-o-Lantern rocket launcher, and Easter swapped the regular grenade launcher for one that shot giant bouncy eggs).
  • The holiday season each year adds Christmas tree lights to all the bushes (including the disguise), adds holiday themed decorations to certain houses on the map, replaces certain minor landmarks with Christmas trees that could have chests under them, reskins the Battle Bus from blue to red and green with wreathes, replaces the Bus's balloon with a Santa-shaped one, changes the Bus's usual club beats to a slow, melodic carol-esque song, and makes the grenade launcher shoot exploding snowman heads.
  • The 2018 World Cup led to the broken-down houses north of Pleasant Park being replaced by a large unnamed soccer field, alongside outfits of the default characters in soccer player gear, with axes, a glider, and an emote to match.
  • 2019 had a "Fourteen Days of Summer" event with its own challenges and rewards, temporarily added giant beach balls and sun umbrellas to the map, and turned hoverboards into rainbow-colored surfboards.
  • Playing on New Year's Eve will have a countdown appear in the sky at the top of each hour to ring in the New Year for places around the world that leads to fireworks being displayed in the sky, and all players automatically dancing around (which results in the player being unable to do anything else) for a short period of time.
• Hyperactive Metabolism:
  • The apples and mushrooms found on the ground are able to heal and increase one's shield respectively. Unlike bandages and smaller potions, the player can consume as much food as they can find.
  • The Fortnite's first birthday event also added slices of cake that heal both health and shield, but can only be found around decorative whole cakes which spawn in fixed locations.
  • Season 8 introduced bananas, coconuts, and hot peppers. They work similar to apples, but hot peppers will also give a temporary burst of speed.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: This is how Mecha Team Leader finishes off the monster during the Final Showdown event in Season 9.
• Impossibly Cool Weapon: Season 9's final item introduction was a grenade that, when thrown, calls in an air strike made of no less than 20 missiles on the spot it impacts. Each individual missile removes 75 of your opponent's potential 200 health and is powerful enough to destroy a wooden wall. Now consider the fact that there's 20 of them.
• Interspecies Romance: Season 4's "Quiet On The Set!◊" loading screen depicts, among other things, Leviathan (a fish in a robotic suit) and Jungle Scout (a human woman) caressing each other. The description states that Leviathan was just puckering up for a kiss before the prison behind them was hit by a meteor. Later, Season 5's "Opening Night◊" loading screen shows a group of characters about to watch a movie, with Leviathan embracing Jungle Scout among the crew.
• Involuntary Dance: The Boogie Bomb forces those who were hit (including yourself and your teammates) to dance for a few seconds at the cost of not being able to do anything but move and jump. This also dismounts the player(s) from vehicles.
• Italians Talk with Hands: While no talking is involved, the "Praise The Tomato" emote ends with both hands in a distinctly Italian pose. Literally praising the tomato.
• Kaiju: The monster underneath Polar Peak, the Devourer, is a huge monster that ends up fighting the mecha that was built specifically for the monster in the Final Showdown event in Season 9.
• Lawyer-Friendly Cameo: "Orange Justice" is allegedly the implementation of the infamous "Orange Shirt Kid's" dance after he lost the #BoogieDown contest, despite the perceived disparity in recognition and fame. In reality, it seemed to actually be one of Roy Purdy's extremely similar dances, as implementing the real dance would most likely incur legal problems from failing to enforce what is basically a contract, i.e. the terms of the contest... except for the fact that in the game files, it is named "Mask Off", and the hand movements of the dance is clearly taken from this video from June of 2017, which explains why the theme for Orange Justice is a Suspiciously Similar Song to Future's Mask Off.
• Leitmotif: The Zero Point is often associated with the music played during The End.
• Lighter and Softer:
  • Battle Royale contains none of the dark undertones of Save the World, even going so far as to imply the island itself is nowhere near as violent as the game makes it out to be. This is especially true in the Blockbuster and Road Trip storylines, where the former is about movie crews working under the pressure of the recent meteor impacts and discovering an alien who only wants to go home, and the latter is simply about a group of friends having fun and Drift genuinely enjoying himself after the obviously fear-inducing experience of being sucked into another world with no way to get home.
  • After Chapter 3, Season 2's storyline involving the season long war against the Imagined Order to liberate the island from them, resulting in several locations being destroyed in the crossfire and cumulating with the deployment of the Mecha Team Leader to destroy their doomsday weapon, the Chapter 3, Season 3 trailer follows this up with depicting the victorious Loopers having fun with watersports, amusement park rides and parties. This is even acknowledged by the season's title, "Vibin", which is a general term referring to relaxation.
• Little Red Fighting Hood: Fable is this trope to a T. Loading screens feature her fighting off several werewolves and even a hunting a vampire.
• Lord British Postulate: A variation in the Battle Royale mode. In Season 3, due to the fact that a certain quest involved interacting with ice cream trucks, Epic Games buffed the health of all the trucks to 100,000. That didn't stop the players from trying to destroy them anyway.
• Macross Missile Massacre: One of the grenades at your disposal is essentially an air strike stowed away in your pocket - throw it somewhere and watch twenty super powerful missiles rain down on your enemies.
• Made of Indestructium: Certain structures will merely trigger an "ineffectual picking" animation if you're not allowed to mine it for materials, like certain walls and silo doors and particularly the cube crystals growing through the house - you'll find several attempts online to destroy just the house and leave an odd crystal structure in its place.
• Magic Mushroom: You can eat blue mushrooms to generate five points of shielding per shroom.
• Mature Rating: Several examples.
  • Several cosmetics based on R and M-rated properties go by different set names.
    • Borderlands was renamed to "Mayhem".
    • God of War was renamed to "Oathbreaker".
    • Halo was renamed to "Master Chief".
    • The Walking Dead (2010) was renamed to "Survivors In Arms''.
    • Predator was renamed to "Jungle Hunter".
    • Terminator was renamed to "Future War".
    • Alien was renamed to "In Space...".
    • Tomb Raider was renamed to "Lara Croft".
    • All Rick and Morty sets follow the format of the character's name followed by ", C-137", with all but Mr. Meeseeks doing this.
    • The Suicide Squad was renamed to "Task Force X".
    • Bad Boys (1995) was renamed to "Loose Cannon".
    • Resident Evil was renamed to "S.T.A.R.S Team" for Chris and Jill's set, and "Raccoon City Survivors" for Leon and Claire's).
    • Gears of War was renamed to "Delta-One".
    • The Matrix was renamed to "Follow The White Rabbit".
    • Assassin's Creed was renamed to "Tales From The Animus".
    • RoboCop was renamed to "Omni Consumer Products".
    • Destiny was renamed to "Legends of Light and Dark".
    • Evil Dead was renamed to "Knowby Cabin Nightmare".
    • Doom was renamed to "Ultra-Nightmare".
    • The Witcher was renamed to "School of The Wolf" for Geralt's set, and "Silver and Sorcery" for Ciri and Yennifer's.
    • Dead Space was renamed to "Strange Transmissions".
    • Attack on Titan was renamed to "Special Operations Squad".
    • The Elder Scrolls was renamed to "Heroes of Tamriel".
    • Halloween was renamed to "The Shape".
    • Alan Wake was renamed to "Waking Nightmare".
    • Invincible (2021) was renamed to "Guardians of The Globe".
    • Metal Gear was renamed to Sneaking.
  • In November 2023, Epic assigned specific age ratings to various modes, preventing players from using specific cosmetics in different modes. This change was then semi-reverted following major backlash.
• Megaton Punch: During the Final Showdown event in season 9, Mecha Team Leader punches through the vault and dig a spherical object of power, absorb its powers, and punches in the monster in its face, sending it flying and destroying a few houses in the process.
• Metagame: The building part of the game used to not have nearly as much effect on the fighting, as it took a while to build things due to only being able to move to the right on the building select list. If you could build a staircase with a wall in front you were golden, and other than that building was mainly used to get around. As the seasons went on, eventually "build battles" started, in which players in a fight spam building pieces to try and get the high ground on each other and take potshots when they get a chance, basically mandating a switch to the Builder Pro control scheme in order to keep up and making people invest time into learning how to constantly swap between building and weapons on the fly.
  • This essentially meant that lobbies would usually be dominated by the few players who had mastered editing and building and could run circles around the rest. Thankfully, Zero Build Mode was introduced, amid much rejoicing. In this mode, terrain and cover become much more important. Running across an open field (without any deployable cover) becomes a silly move.
• The Mall: Season 9 in 2019 had Retail Row evolved into the Mega Mall, the biggest indoor combat area to date (which can still be levelled with enough time and ammo.)
• Midas Touch: Midas, the aptly-named final skin of the Chapter 2, Season 2 Battle Pass, permanently turns any weapons and vehicles he touches to solid gold. There's no loss of functionality, and if him petting Meowscles in the season trailer is any indication he has at least some control over it (though he and the rest of the BP skins slowly turning gold as one levels up may suggest otherwise...).
• Mobile Shrubbery:
  • The Bush item disguises the player (unsurprisingly) as a bush until they take some damage.
  • The Sneaky Snowman, similarly, disguises the player as a snowman. Not so similarly, it gives them 100 points of snow armor, but will break if they pull out another item — and can be thrown instead of worn, to mislead your enemies.
• Modesty Shorts: All female skins use this trope, but it's especially notable with the Fable skin, due to having a long and free-flowing skirt.
• The Monolith: The purple space cube is a more proactive take on this trope.
• More Dakka: The Food Fight LTM brings with it a dual machine gun turret (deployed like the traps), which comes with infinite ammo and merciless damage, with just its overheating holding it back.
• Ms. Fanservice: The beginning of Season 6 brought forth a new skin named Calamity, a cowgirl with a white tank top, plenty of midriff, short denim shorts, and some accidental Jiggle Physics.
• Mundane Solution: While the turret was intended as the go-to weapon for hitting the enemy target in Food Fight, there's nothing stopping you from using some other weapon, be it the heavy assault rifle or the six shooter.
• Mythology Gag:
  • The opening cinematic to Chapter 2 Season 6 that transitions it from Season 5 has a part specifically referencing Terminator 2: Judgment Day, where Ripley drives a truck off a bridge (like the T-1000 did in the movie) to help Sarah against the T-800s.
  • Chapter 4 Season 3 sees the addition of Optimus Prime, who transfers his consciousness into a man-high body that can no longer transform. This was actually the premise of the Action Masters toyline.
  • Chapter 5 Season 1 has the TMNT Ninja Stances, with each Stance's base having a trophy from a different enemy the turtles have fought. Leo has the head and foot of Metalhead the robotic turtle, Mikey has some Mouser heads, Donnie has a tattered Foot Clan banner and some throwing stars, and Raph has the Shredder's helmet.
• Negative Space Wedgie: As part of Battle Royale's ongoing developing storyline, on June 30th, 2018, at precisely 1:30 PM EST, a rocket launched from the supervillain lair located on the hill next to Snobby Shores. Once it reached sufficient altitude, various objects started raining down in certain locations, before the rocket itself exploded and left a giant shattered crack in the sky. Smaller ones then began to pop up afterwards, including at Greasy Grove (taking the burger part of the Durrr Burger sign with it) and at Retail Row.
• Nerf: Many have come and gone, including lowering trap damage from 125 to 75 (before bumping it back up to 150), decreasing pump-action shotgun damage (from 90 to 80 with a green one and 95 to 85 with a blue one, plus lowering the headshot damage multiplier from 2.5 to 2.0) so that it's impossible to score a One-Hit Kill, and cutting down the amount of spare rockets you can have to 12 total to keep games from becoming rocket spam. Notably, Season 5 led to double pumping getting completely destroyed, as the amount of time it takes to fire a second shotgun after shooting a first was increased to the point that it's pointless to even attempt.
• Never Say "Die": As stated below in Non-Lethal K.O., nobody actually dies in Battle Royale, so the word "elimination" is used instead of "kill" to denote defeated players.
• New Season, New Name: Several, to coincide with the themes of each season.
  • Chapter 1:
    • Season 1: First Flight
    • Season 2: Fort Knights
    • Season 3: Intergalactic
    • Season 4: Brace For Impact
    • Season 5: Worlds Collide
    • Season 6: Darkness Rises
    • Season 7: You Better Watch Out
    • Season 8: X Marks The Spot
    • Season 9: The Future Is Yours
    • Season X: Out Of Time
  • Chapter 2:
    • Season 1: A New World
    • Season 2: Top Secret
    • Season 3: Splashdown
    • Season 4: Nexus War
    • Season 5: Zero Point
    • Season 6: Primal
    • Season 7: Invasion
    • Season 8: Cubed
  • Chapter 3:
    • Season 1: Flipped
    • Season 2: Resistance
    • Season 3: Vibin'
    • Season 4: Paradise
  • Chapter 4:
    • Season 1: Reforged
    • Season 2: Mega
    • Season 3: Wilds
    • Season 4: Last Resort
    • Season OG: Where We Droppin'?
  • Chapter 5:
    • Season 1: Underground
    • Season 2: Myths and Mortals
• Ninja Run: Possible with the use of the "Full Tilt" emote.
• Nipple and Dimed: The Travis Scott event of 2020 features a shirtless CGI Travis who's subjected to this trope, ultimately leading to the hashtag #savetravisnips.
• Nitro Boost:
  • The All-Terrain Karts have a powerslide feature. Much like in Mario Kart, maintaining a slide long enough results in a speed boost when you let go, with the boost getting more powerful the longer you drift.
  • New for Season 6, the Quadcrasher is more of a straight example, speed boost during button press followed by a cooldown time - with the addition of being able to break through anything.
  • In Chapter 2, Boats and the Whiplash Vehicle have this equipped in similar fashion to the Quadcrasher, with the Whiplash lacking a cooldown timer, but consuming more of the vehicle's fuel in the process.
• No Fair Cheating: Playground and other sandbox modes don't let you complete challenges. You have to do them in modes where you run into the risk of unfamiliar players or the storm eliminating you. You can mitigate that risk by playing in 50 vs. 50 mode or Team Rubmle, where half of the map is generally safe, but that just makes it a Luck-Based Mission as to which half is safe.
• Non-Indicative Name:
  • Despite being called "Battle Royale" mode, several limited time modes aren't related to Battle Royale at all.
    • 50v50 and Teams of 20 pit massive teams against each other as opposed to small groups like the genre standard.
    • Getaway revolves around getting a jewel from a supply drop and reaching an escape van.
    • Score Royale's goal is to reach the required number of points first by collecting loot and killing other players.
    • Disco Domination is basically Domination from the Call of Duty series (complete with respawning in the first few circles), except with two teams of 30 and you're capturing dance floors instead of flags.
    • Team Rumble is essentially a regular old Team Deathmatch.
  • Campfires and Launch Pads are classified as traps, despite having no harmful properties; the former just regenerates health for you and your allies and the latter launches you up with the chance to deploy your glider (though you can get hurt or die from failing to deploy your glider before you land). Bounce Pads can possibly throw off enemies who come near them, but their main purpose is to propel yourself and your allies upwards, as players who use them become immune to fall damage until after they land.
• Non-Lethal K.O.: Implied when a player is eliminated, adding to the lighthearted nature of the game. Nobody sheds a drop of blood at any point, and instead of leaving a corpse, a teleporter of sorts whisks their body out of the island, leaving behind only the items they had. When the player returns to the lobby, the same teleporter puts the player back on the lobby pedestal, none worse for the wear. The "High Explosives" and "Fly Explosives" Limited-Time Modes outright mention blasting your opponents "back to the lobby," and the "outlive X players" challenges were edited late in Season 7 to say "outlast" instead to keep in line with this.
• No Scope: The only weapon truly capable of this is the heavy sniper rifle, which lacks the targeting crosshairs during normal use (something even the pickaxe has). Considering the massive reloading time, if you can pull it off, more power to you. That said, as far as the game is concerned, killing someone with a sniper-type weapon while not zoomed in is enough to qualify.
• Nostalgia Level:
  • While the Chapter 2 map as a whole featured new points of interest and landmarks, three POIs from the Chapter 1 map ^note Pleasant Park, Retail Row, and Salty Springs made it to the new map, no worse for wear.
  • Chapter 3 featured a total of six old locations throughout its four seasons, with five from Chapter 1 ^note Greasy Grove, Lazy Lagoon, Loot Lake, Shifty Shafts, and Tilted Towers, and one from Chapter 2 ^note Butter Barn.
  • Chapter 4's final season, Chapter 4 Season OG, returned players to the first island for one month. Each week progressed the map from Season 5 to Season X, new cosmetic skins were mashups of iconic Fortnite characters, and the Big Bang finale event played out similarly to The End (the first chapter's finale event), only now including more content after the black hole destroyed the map once again.
• Not the Fall That Kills You…: Falling from a great height damages you, and it is possible to kill someone by blasting away the floor from under their feet. Oh, and don't think that sliding down a cliff will negate the fall damage, because it will still apply in full force. Building floors while sliding down said cliff can help. Using a Hop Rock or Bounce Pad negates fall damage.
• Not the Intended Use:
  • The Tomato toy often gets a lot of use from players who want to learn the names of their teammates in big game modes like 50v50, since it tells you the name of who you hit in the feed.
  • The Streamer Mode option to hide other players' names briefly replaced their username with their skin name. This had to be changed to refer to them as "Player", because players could (and, thus, would) exploit it to know whether someone they were fighting had managed to get themselves eliminated somewhere out of sight.
• Nothing Is the Same Anymore: Chapter Finale events have a habit of reforming the island. Don't expect it to be the same island whenever a new chapter begins.
• Obvious Rule Patch:
  • When a real-time worldwide event is taking place, the Battle Royale island won't be available in Creative and Playgrounds. If you want to watch the event, you have to go into a proper game and risk being eliminated. Eventually, some Anti-Frustration Features were implemented so that players can't hurt each other.
  • "Battle Lab" doesn't allow you to finish challenges or earn XP.
  • Victories in Team Rumble, where you can only place first or second, does not count towards the Place Top 10 quest.
• Oh, Crap!: Lampshaded in Chapter 3, when the Scientist makes you run up to the mountain range to find his seismographs.
  A real scientist never admits it when things don't look good. They just say "huh, that's different." So... Huh. That's different.
• Ominous Cube: Kevin the Cube, first appearing in Chapter 1 Season 5, spent most of its life messing with parts of the world, most remarkably lifting the small island in the middle of Loot Lake in the air before tearing it apart.
• Operation: [Blank]:
  • All four LTMs that are part of the Spy Games event are named this way: "Operation: Dropzone", "Operation: Knockout", "Operation: Payload" and "Operation: Infiltration".
  • The holiday event that took place during Chapter 2 Season 5 is called "Operation: Snowdown".
  • The end-of-season live event for Chapter 2 Season 7 is called "Operation: Skyfire".
• Our Ghosts Are Different: Picking up a Shadow Stone can turn any player character into a ghost, including humans, werewolves, robots, space robots, vampires, and guys in llama suits. This decreases their gravity, lets them phase through walls, and turn invisible when immobile. Oddly, they aren't immune to weapons in this state.
• Pacifist Run: It is entirely possible, though rare, to win a round of Battle Royale without killing anymore, or even without attacking at all, usually if the last few opponents kill each other or die from their own carelessness (such as one of their own explosives, fall damage, or getting caught in the storm).
• Parasol of Pain: The "Kingsman" weapon, introduced in Chapter 2, Season 2. as the name may suggest, it serves as a bulletproof shield and a melee weapon that can be swung or charged up to launch you forward. It also provides a much more logical (though no more feasible) example of the trope below than the actual victory umbrellas; you can open it to slow your fall, but it doesn't last long before turning inside out and dropping you again.
• Parasol Parachute: These are an alternative to gliders, with the player able to earn a new one by winning their first non-large team based match in a season. Strangely, despite appearing to be made entirely out of metal, they float just as well as normal gliders do.
• Pass the Popcorn:
  • Can be invoked with an emote given as the Tier 31 item of Season 4's Battle Pass, which features your character whipping out a bucket of popcorn and tossing kernels at their face.
  • The Season 6 opening cutscene contains a Skull Trooper doing this as he watches the center island of Loot Lake rise into the air, to the bemusement of the Sun Tan Specialist next to him.
• Pass Through the Rings:
  • Weekly missions that appeared late into Seasons 3, 4, and 6 required the player to skydive through some floating ones.
  • In Season 5, attempting a time trial on the east coast racetrack will require you to drive through these. Season 6 added another racetrack on the northwest corner of the map, just east of Junk Junction, with the same goal.
  • Day Five of the winter 2018 "14 Days of Fortnite" event had the obligatory "five golden rings" joke; you had to fly through them with the X-4 Stormwing.
• Piñata Enemy: The cube monsters of Season 6, though whether they drop anything is completely random (there's actual pinatas for that).
• Pointless Band-Aid: Drift wears one next to his left eye.
• Portal Network: Throughout Chapter 1 Seasons 6 and 7, there was a small portal network connecting underground bases in Weeping Woods.
• Potty Dance: Season 6 gives us the "It's Go Time!" emote, which is just your character grabbing their crotch and hopping in place to intense music. The description reads "It's either now, or right now!"
• Promoted to Playable: In Chapter 2, Season 2, you can fight any of five elite agents or Deadpool as bosses. If you buy the battle pass, you can eventually unlock them as outfits if you gain enough experience. The next two seasons also have a few bosses that can likewise be unlocked via premium battle pass progression.
• Puny Parachute: Gliders, even the "full-sized" ones that aren't parasols, really are way too small to do what they do.
• Purposely Overpowered:
  • In the 'Infinity Gauntlet' limited mode, any player who gets the titular gauntlet becomes Thanos, who is just as powerful as you’d expect him to be.
  • Thanos returns in the Endgame mode, retaining all his power from before, plus a team of Chitauri Mooks. The other team, representing the Avengers, is far more powerful than the Chitauri one-on-one, but not as strong as Thanos. Everyone in the mode has the statistics to curbstomp a player of an ordinary mode, though you obviously won't be seeing that fight in practice.
• Ramming Always Works: During the Final Showdown event in season 9, Mecha Team Leader tackles the Devourer into the ocean.
• Random Events Plot: Used to justify the differences in season themes. In just three seasons from Chapter 2 alone: Midas flooded the map by accident, then Aquaman showed up, and then Marvel Superheroes appeared to prevent Galactus from destroying the island.
• Reclaimed by Nature:
  • Dusty Depot was destroyed by a meteor at the end of Season 3, which then became Dusty Divot at the start of Season 4. By the start of Season 5, a fully grown forest had reclaimed the impact crater.
  • After the cube rips apart and the rift closes in Season 6, Leaky Lake has suddenly stabilized with greenery having formed within roughly a minute from the start of the event. By Season 7, even the corrupted areas have cleared up.
• Recycled Premise: Season 7's "Ice Storm" event modes were unabashed copies of Season 6's "Fortnitemares". The only explicit change is the addition of heavy fog — every other difference is due to the overall metagame having evolved with gamewide updates.
• Reset Button: Season X ended with the Seven causing the entire universe to collapse into a singularity to stop an irreversible Time Crash from consuming everything; Chapter 2 begins in the new universe created by this attack.
• Revenue-Enhancing Devices: Many, many items are available from the in-game store and the Battle Pass, and all of them are cosmetic, including dances, icons, spraypaints, toys, outfits, gliders, and axes (Battle Stars are also occasionally sold, but they just increase your Battle Pass tier, which leads to more cosmetics). A maxed-out gold Battle Pass earns, among other things, enough V-Bucks to upgrade next season's pass with a handful left over, and you can earn a trickle of V-Bucks even on a silver Battle Pass, so theoretically you could be earning as much content as paid players without having ever spent a dime, but you'd have to spend several seasons earning barely anything just to get there.
• Revolvers Are Just Better: The Six Shooter introduced in Season 6. Despite just a 6-round load, the accuracy, speedy reload and fantastic rate of fire during normal use (literally shoot-from-the-hip fan-fire) make it a handy-dandy weapon.
• Riding the Bomb: Players can take a risk and jump onto a rocket fired by their teammate as it flies through the air and ride on it to shoot people from above while looking cool.
• Right-Hand Cat: Played for Laughs in the Spies event of Chapter 2 - Midas is introduced as having one, except it turns out to be Meowscles.
• Rocket Jump: Impulse Grenades and Shockwave Grenades are designed for this trope, dealing heavy knockback and no damage. Kit's Shockwave Launcher, a weapon that fired Impulse Grenades using rocket ammo, was almost exclusively used for this purpose. Trying it with regular rockets is not advised.
• Rocket-Tag Gameplay: Battles are very ambush heavy, as it doesn't take much for even basic weapons to drain your health quickly. Add in stuff like rocket launchers, grenades and other assortments of insane legendary weapons, the end of each match usually comes down to whoever is better at movement/building quickly.
• Running Gag: In Chapter 1, a building in Tilted Towers was destroyed and rebuilt multiple times. Every time it was rebuilt, it would last just a few weeks before it was leveled. When Tilted Towers was destroyed at the end of Season 8, it was the only building left standing.
• Shopping Cart Antics: You can find and use shopping carts for faster travel. If you have teammates, one of them can ride in the basket of the cart and fire away while you push them around.
• Short-Range Shotgun: While the pump and tactical fit this bill well, the crown goes to the double barrel shotgun, which is capable of dealing damage in the 120s but only if you're close enough to kiss your enemy.
• Spelling Bonus: One of the weekly missions for the first week of Season 4 was collecting floating letters that appeared on short-to-moderately tall surfaces to spell out "Fortnite".
• "Staying Alive" Dance Pose: Part of a dance that can be bought with V-Bucks.
• Stealth-Based Game: You pretty much have to be hidden and out of sight for most of the game if you want to survive your way to high standings, as once another player sees you, it's a short matter of time before either of you end up dead (or both, if explosives get involved). Averted in 50v50 and other large team modes, where the game tends to develop into frontline battles where stealth is a non-concern.
• Stealth Pun: In Chapter 2 Season 4, one achievement involves finding Baby Groot in a plant nursery.
• Streamer-Friendly Mode: There's an option to hide your name from players outside your squad (instead referring to you as "Anonymous"), as well as a separate option to hide those players' names from you (referring to them as "Player"). These used to be combined as a single option, called "Streamer Mode", but by popular demand, the two aspects were separated.
• Stuff Blowing Up: Grenades, Remote Explosives, Clingers, Stink Bombs, Grenade Launchers, and Rocket Launchers do great damage to those in the vicinity of the explosion. Exaggerated in the High Explosives LTM, in which explosive weapons are the only weapons that spawn.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: Chapter 3 Season 3 introduces the Scientist's AI assistant, the Artificial Machine Intelligence Engine also known as AMIE, who's pretty much Ray from Save the World but as a Yandere.
• Temporary Online Content:
  • There have been multiple game modes that were only available for a few days at a time before disappearing. These include one where 2 teams of 50 went at each other, one with only snipers and revolvers, one with only suppressed weapons and increased bush disguise drops, and one where all weapon drops were legendary.
  • In the same mode, parts of the map change permanently as in-universe lore develops. For example, Dusty Depot was destroyed by a meteor and turned into Dusty Divot at the start of Season 4, and the beginning of Season 5 replaced the entire swamp area with a desert and Anarchy Acres with the Lazy Links golf course.
  • Certain items have been put in and taken out of the game, typically because they weren't used much, were hard to balance, were only intended to be temporary in the first place, or just because. For example, shock traps and smoke grenades fit the first category, the Guided Missile fits the second (although it was later retooled with recon as a focus), the Jetpack fits the third, and (starting with Season 6) Impulse Grenades and Bouncers fit the last.
  • Battle Pass cosmetics and Victory Umbrellas for each season can only be unlocked during that season. Evolving Battle Pass outfits can only be leveled up during their season.
• That Russian Squat Dance: Part of the purchasable "Squat Kick" emote.
• There Was a Door: An inevitable part of gameplay. If you don't know a part of the map and decide to destroy the nearest wall, you may be greeted with a door nearby that could've made your life easier (and potentially less noisy). On the other hand, you got more mats at your disposal now.
• Toilet Humour:
  • The gas station chain is called Pass 'N' Gas. Passing gas, as in farting.
  • One of the areas is called Flush Factory. It's a factory dedicated solely to manufacturing toilets.
• Tractor Beam: Towards the end of Chapter 2 Season 6, UFOs would randomly show up and abduct players with these - in the following season, you get to commandeer these UFOs, and use the tractor beam to throw players and any random junk you can pick up.
• Trap Is the Only Option: A common tactic in duos and squads is to pick off players straggling from their team, and then instead of finishing them off, camping over them while they bleed out. The idea is that their teammate(s) will rush over, hoping to apply Combat Resuscitation, but you'll take them down while they're short a member. The probability that they know this is your plan is 100% — but the alternative is not rescuing their buddy, which is almost never a good idea.
• Trapped in Another World: Drift is a graffiti artist/racer from the real world who was transported to the world of Fortnite after a rift teleported the Durr Burger mascot back into the Battle Royale map. After this, he starts to take on... a different approach.
• Trash the Set: Season X's The End event completely obliterates everything. You thought Final Fantasy XIV's infamous 1.0 ending was ravaging? Bahamut didn't cause a black hole.
• Trick Bomb: The Boogie Bomb causes those caught up in its blast radius to start dancing on the spot for five seconds, or until they take damage.
• Twinkle in the Sky: After beating the Polar Peak Monster, the Mecha Team Leader flies off into space, forming this.
• Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny: The absolutely staggering number of crossover characters make Fortnite the closest officially licensed thing to the trope namer. Cool Versus Awesome indeed.
• Unmoving Plaid: The Galaxy skin takes one of the default male outfits and gives the majority of his body a galaxy style that doesn't move with him.
• Virtual Paper Doll: You can customize your character's appearance in several aspects, such as their outfit, modifications to said outfit, and on-the-back items (known as "Back Bling").
• Visual Pun: The "Pump Up the Jam" emote is basically acting out all the lyrics, with "jam" represented by miming holding up a jar of jam.
• The Voiceless: Everyone until recently. In Chapter 2 Season 4, explicitly voiced Marvel characters were noted as losing their ability to talk. Tony Stark "hacking" the Loop at the end of the season is implied to have made permanent changes to the nature of the island, allowing characters to speak and act as NPCs.
• Walking Spoiler: Save The World players know that the main villain behind the disappearance of all humanity is the Storm King. Guess what? In the first season of the Chapter 2 battle royale map, he shows up as a special raid boss for the 2019 Fortnitemares, and he's open season for those who've perhaps never played ''Save The World yet!
• We Win, Because You Didn't: The Endgame LTM works this way — Thanos and the Chitauri share 100 respawns, and their goal is to collect all the Infinity Stones, disable respawning for the other team, and kill them. The Avengers' goal is to make them burn through those 100 respawns before they can accomplish this.
• Wham Episode: Season X as a whole was this. It revealed that the Visitor was a part of a group named the Seven, which also had two other members make their first appearances. It named the Loop and the Bridge for the first time in the mode's first proper lines of dialogue. The season ended with the Seven creating a black hole, with other easter eggs peppered throughout the season that raised more questions than answers.
• Whole Costume Reference:
  • From the neck down, Jack Gourdon is based on David S Pumpkins — the only difference is that his head is a pumpkin instead of a Tom Hanks likeness.
  • Bruno Mars and Anderson.paak are wearing black kung fu pants and long yellow sweats, referencing Bruce Lee.
• Wide-Open Sandbox: Playground mode drops you onto the island with just you and your optional squadmates without the hassle of opponents trying to kill you, letting you focus on exploring and building. However, most challenges cannot be completed and XP cannot be earned in Playground mode.
• You Must Be This Tall to Ride: The Chapter 3 Season 3 trailer has a scene where a Stormtrooper realizes they're too short to ride, so Darth Vader lifts them higher using the Force, which apparently satisfies the ride manager.

Special Limited Time Modes

The special limited time modes described in this folder include:

• Mando's Bounty from Chapter 2 Season 5
• Impossible Escape from Chapter 2 Season 6
• Imposters from Chapter 2 Season 7

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• And I Must Scream: Agents who get eliminated in the Imposters LTM are trapped in-between realities by the Imposter's Device, leaving them as "ghosts" who can only see each other and roam the main reality but cannot interact with anything. Fortunately, IO can probably reverse this seeing as they have their own Devices, but if the Imposters win…
• But Thou Must!: When ordering food in the Cafeteria in the Imposters LTM, if you try selecting items that aren't labeled with sale and aren't listed on the list, the tablet will tell you that they're sold out, forcing you to pick the correct option.
• Continuity Cavalcade: From the Imposters LTM:
  • The Sleeping Quarters is Jonesy's room. Turns out he's the owner of Bonesy, is a fan of Fort Fighters (a Bland-Name Product of Street Fighter, which explains why he likes Ryu), and has various costumes that his snapshots wear.
  • The Cafeteria has three restaurant options: Pizza Pit, Taco Shack, and Durr Burger.
• Shout-Out: The Imposters LTM is a blatant copy of Among Us.
• Very Special Episode: The Martin Luther King Jr. event.

Creative

• Audience Participation: "The Block" in Season 7 was a contest for replacing Risky Reels to the most creative player-made Point-Of-Interest location using Creative Mode. A new POI was placed every few days.
• Portal Network: All of the islands created by players currently in a server (as well as islands featured by the developers) are accessible via a hub with interconnecting rifts.
• Virtual Paper Doll: All customization options from the other modes are available in Creative.
• Wide-Open Sandbox: Players have infinite resources, exclusive building tools, access to assets from the other modes and game modifiers to create the ultimate sandbox for up to 16 players.

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Woman: Aside from the part where we almost died, that was amazing!

Ramirez: Hey, don't mention it. It's all in a nite's work.

(A flare is fired from a man on a pizza restaurant sign)

Man: HELP!

Ramirez: (to her squadmates) All right, guys, who's up for pizza?

Ken: Oh, yeah... PIZZA!