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How to Get Better at Fortnite

by Zaraki Kenpachi

Fortnite has remained one of the most popular games around, long after some thought the fad would pass. It has even grown a competitive scene that rewards a ludacris amount of money, with tournaments that anyone can take part in. As one of the most open and free competitive scenes, there are plenty of reasons to get into Fortnite. However, the game is not quite as simple as it might seem on the surface. Behind the fun cartoony aesthetic, there’s a complex meta for the game. If you’re wondering how to get better at Fortnite, you need to be able to do more than fire straight and luck out looting.

If your skill has plateaued or you’re just getting into the game, there are some strategies you can follow to get better at Fortnite.

Skills to Get Better at Fortnite

There are a lot of different aspects to playing well in Fortnite. There are ever-changing mechanics and balances for the items, core skills that you need, and even small tweaks and performance changes you can make. These are the main ways to get better at Fortnite:

  • Improving Your Performance – This is physically improving your skill at the game, building better, aiming better, and thinking better to make more successful plays.
  • Optimizing Your Performance – This is watching replays to catch your mistakes, optimizing your in-game settings, and finding a strategy that works for you.
  • Practice – This is the most important step, and frankly the one that makes the other two possible.

This is how you can work on those things to get better at Fortnite:

How to Get Better at Fortnite with Building

Building is Fortnite’s unique mechanic and it’s vital to improving. If you’re a beginner, you need to start by learning when and how to build, or even to sweat and ‘crank 90s’. This is essentially building two walls (proving 90 degrees of cover) and a ramp. This gives you a height advantage in a firefight and cover to retreat down. If your enemy pops one too, build another layer up to grab the high ground. At a certain point, your builds are going to intersect. This is where things get more complicated.

Here, you’ll need to start throwing walls up to block and look for an opportunity. Once you have height and the angle right, edit your wall to allow space for a shotgun blast before moving and throwing cover back up. The objective is still to get height, have cover protecting you, and look for an opening. Doing this consistently is how to get better at Fortnite, but it is easier said than done.

If your opponent throws themselves into a covered box, you’ll need to work on a more complex mechanic; piece control. This comes from you being the one to control one wall or ‘piece’ of the box. Then you can edit in a window or a half wall to take a shot. This applies to both box and build fights. You’ll need speedy edits, speedy builds, and the knowledge of how to have a build fight without just spamming random shapes. For more experienced players looking at how to get better at Fortnite, that whole ‘not just spamming’ thing is more important. Building at random while panicking is a bad habit. Build deliberately, chase height, get cover, and position yourself. Don’t just build at random. Jumping into a build fight server can be handy to work on this skill.

Improving Your Aim in Fortnite – Shooting

Building is a major part of the game, but Fortnite is a shooter at its heart. In harder fights, you’ll have only brief openings to fire off your shot. With the ability to build cover, entire Fortnite endgames can devolve into boxed-up players taking single shots at each other, so your aim is vital.

You need to start with the right sensitivity. For a PC, this is typically low allowing bigger movements with your mouse allowing for greater precision. It would be great if you could master aiming perfect headshots at a high sensitivity for speed. But it is physically much more difficult to do than mastering a lower sens. On a controller, it is a bit different. You’ll need a sensitivity that gives you a good perciscion over your aim, but also a decent turn speed. Start at 0.9-1.2, then experiment and tweak till you find the perfect notch. Running through aim courses in creative is boring, but good mechanical practice. Just be sure to throw in some 1v1s after so you can actually apply it in-game.

How to Get Better at Fortnite through Game Sense

Game sense takes a different form in Fortnite than in CS:GO or League of Legends. Fortnite’s map is huge and changes often, its loot is random but you can loot in a way that often nets you decent gear. You need to know the POIs, get into the habit of choosing good rotation, and looting well. This means landing in a spot with enough loot for your team size. Avoid the first drop or Salty if you’re not feeling like fighting 40 people over one chest, and take advantage of rotation options like shockwave grenades and cars.

In terms of positioning, height advantage is key here. Building is going to help you out, so you need to be harvesting a lot in the early game. If you run out of mats in the final zone, it won’t end well. However, rotating into the high ground on each of the last few zones gives you an inherent advantage. You take the position with an advantage, saving you a bit of time and resources with building.

If you’re looking how to get better at Fortnite, the loadout isn’t the most complicated area. You’ll need a healing item, an AR, and a shotgun. Your other two slots can be rotation items, snipers, and specialist weapons like explosives or fire. You need to cater this to both what you find in rotation, and your play style. If you can’t snipe, stop carrying one! If the last circle is in an area dense with buildings, pick up items to start fires and wreck the environment.

You need to know when to take a fight and when not to. Essentially, take a fight if you’re in an advantageous position and if you’re not then get into one before they take a fight with you. If you can choose your battles, get the better position in the late-game, and rotate/loot safely, you’re going to do well.

Improving your Mechanical Skill

Improving your mechanical skill is really the hardest part. Although, using the right sensitivities and controls can help a lot here. For building, you’ll want to switch over to builder pro on a controller. It is really the only way for you to build quickly enough with a gamepad.

Using the great tools created in creative mode to work on specific mechanics can pay off in real games. Run through the drills for building, editing, and shooting. Just remember that you’ll need to play plenty of pubs to apply that practice in-game. Creative drills feel very different to live matches in the end-game, the emotion of live games will limit you unless you play pubs often enough too.

How to Get Better at Fortnite – Practice

The last and probably most important way for you to get better at Fortnite is just to practice. Fortnite is a game built around that grind. Each match goes in a different way, but mostly your mechanical skill and game sense is going to improve with practice. Play as many games as possible. When you do well, think about how it happened. When you lose, find the mistake and try to work on overcoming it in the future. Don’t beat yourself up though, sometimes you’re just mechanically outplayed or beaten by luck.

Practicing helps you to build muscle memory. If you’re doing things the right way, this will increase your skill with building and shooting. Getting faster and more accurate with these elements are going to be vital in actually improving. While it is good to read up and get a good sense of what it is you need to get better at Fortnite upon, no amount of research is a good replacement for hands on experience! Practice is how to get good at Fortnite. So play often, and have fun.

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