Fortnite Save the World is now free to play! We’ll walk through what’s new, and wrap up with tips to progress through the game faster, especially if you’re new or returning from a long absence. 

The center of your operations is the Homebase Headquarters, the refuge of human survivors in the post-storm world. When you’re starting out, make sure to explore this sprawling safe area and familiarize yourself with the layout and your fellow survivors. 

Understand your heroes

There are hundreds of heroes in Save the World, and every one of them fits into one of four classes. 
 

• Constructors are builders at heart, which is a super important role in Save the World, a game about building bases and fending off waves of enemies. Constructors will make your bases tougher and more deadly. They can build turrets on bases to fire at approaching enemies or join the battle. 
• Ninjas are melee-focused fighters, happy to swing their swords and toss throwing stars from a distance, adding some range to this up-close-and-personal class. Their abilities can augment their weapons, helping them take down groups per swing. 
• Outlanders are great for farming resources and gathering loot, thanks to their charge ability. Other heroes have to swing away at, say, cars to mine their resources. Not so with Outlanders, who can, for example, reduce a vehicle to its component parts with a single charge. Other offensive abilities allow them to deploy machines to attack or stun enemies. They’re also great at traversal, dashing around the map with their phase shift ability. 
• Soldiers are fighters by nature, comfortable with assault rifles (ARs) and submachine guns (SMGs). They can carry grenades and miniguns, and their warcry ability can buff allies and damage enemies. 

Classes are shorthands for specialties, and once you learn them, you’ll start matching Save the World’s mission descriptions with your preferred class. For example, in Resupply missions, your job is to collect resources, and you do that by destroying things like vehicles, trees, and walls and collecting the loot hidden inside. Outlanders are a perfect fit for Resupply missions because of their charge ability. 

Use your survivors 

You’ll collect survivors as you play, and you’ll group them into Survivor Squads. These increase your stats in several ways. 

• Fortitude increases health. 
• Offense increases your weapon damage. 
• Resistance increases both the strength of your shield and the rate at which it regenerates. 
• Tech increases the damage of your gadgets, hero abilities, and traps. 

The better survivor stats you have, the more powerful your homebase, and the more powerful your homebase is, the easier it’ll be to complete missions. 

Especially at the beginning of your journey, make sure that Autofill is on. That lets the game make the best decisions as you learn. Later, when you’re intimately familiar with Save the World, feel free to make your own decisions and manually create your own Survivor Squads. 

Know your quests

Your Save the World journey begins in Stonewood, one of four areas alongside Plankerton, Canny Valley, and Twine Peaks. The challenge increases as you fight and defend yourself in each. 

Every map in Save the World is procedurally generated, which effectively creates an infinite variety of options for exploration and discovery in buildings, deserts, forests, and much more. There are several mission types in each, and completing missions is a straightforward path to progressing. 

Each area contains missions, and it’s your job to complete them for XP and loot. It really is that simple, and Save the World’s introductory area and missions offer a simple and straightforward path toward mastery. The Quest Log in your Homebase Headquarters looks like a cork board and offers you missions, including their objectives and rewards. 

Alongside the campaign’s main quests, Save the World is always offering you optional quests—including those that refresh daily—so get in the habit of completing them when you’re out in the world doing campaign missions. 

For example, if you’re out on a main quest, look for exclamation marks on your minimap, which can indicate quests to complete. You’ll head home with more than you would if you’d focused exclusively on the main objective. 

It’s also worth browsing your map for missions that specifically grant XP bonuses. After you highlight a quest on your map, look at the Rewards section at the bottom left of your screen and you may find Bonus XP, People XP, and Schematic XP rewards. 

Activate XP bonuses

If ever you receive an XP bonus item (say, from a certain Llama), make sure to activate it and then get out on the battlefield. It’s basically a fast-pass for leveling up faster. 

Humanity needs you! Save the World in Fortnite: Save the World now.