We have just concluded digging on our third excavation site inside Fortnite, and each site has had a different result. Presumably whoever is doing the digging in Fortnite lore is looking for something specific, and after two mishaps (finding only a volcano vent and unearthing a pool of lava), the third time may have been the charm.
After about a full day of digging by players, as the rocks needed to reveal these sites have hundreds of millions of HP that all Fortnite players across every server have to work together to hack down, the end result of the Loot Lake-adjacent site has been revealed, a mysterious, very large metal door in the floor.
It’s not a hatch, but rather something that looks like oversize, sideways elevator doors. Or possibly the top of something like an underground missile silo. As you might expect, you cannot hack through the doors, and if you hit them, they reverberate with an echoing metallic sound I can’t remember hearing when striking anything else before, but I could be wrong.
Supposedly there are leaked datamined files that show the doors opening, but what’s underneath them is not yet clear. Fortnite is no stranger to secret underground bases, as there was an underground research lab beneath Wailing Woods which originally started as nothing more than a mystery hatch. But this is very far away from that and I doubt that it would be part of the same facility.
The timing of this may indicate that it could have something to do with the arrival of Ruin, the week 8 Discovery skin that Epic unveiled this week. Special unlock skins like this usually have some greater significance to the “plot” of Fortnite, like when the game spent a while drilling out the meteor to reveal The Visitor resting inside. It’s possible that Ruin is behind this door, but it looks oddly smooth and modern to contain a being that appears to be some sort of medieval armored magma god. But who knows.
My hope is that this door opens and we actually get to explore what’s inside. I’m hoping for some sort of deep, underground cavern or facility to explore rather than say, the door opening and there being some sort of sarcophagus or something six feet down. Even if we know the doors will open, we don’t know when, but again, my guess is that this is somehow tied into Ruin, which would make that timeline about a week from this Thursday, if this is something that happens at reset. But the door opening may not be a “big” event like players are expecting from a volcanic eruption, so I suppose it really could happen at any time.
It took a while, but it’s nice to see Fortnite finally getting back on the mystery train, particularly for a season that was supposed to be all about mystery and discovery and exploration. Stay tuned for more door info.
Follow me on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Read my new sci-fi thriller novel Herokiller, available now in print and online. I also wrote The Earthborn Trilogy.
