Season 4 just started in Fortnite: Battle Royale, given players both new and old the opportunity to work their way up towards unlocking 100 pieces of loot over the course of 10 weeks of challenges. Maybe you’ve unlocked the Red Knight and John Wick or maybe this is your first Pass, but it’s a big challenge regardless: Epic has designed this to be something you work towards every day over the course of the next 10 weeks, and it estimates that the whole thing will take 75-150 hours to complete. With that in mind, you’re going to want to be smart about how you go about this.
First off, the basics. The standard Battle Pass starts off at Tier 0, and the premium, 2800 V-Buck Battle Pass starts out at Tier 25. You get five free tiers if you bought the Season 3 Battle Pass, meaning that the highest you can start with a basic purchase would be level 30 — a significant boost over 0, to be sure.
After that, you level up the Battle Pass by gaining Battle Stars, and it takes 10 Battle Stars to gain each tier, making for 1000 stars in total for the complete pass. Battle Stars are rewarded either through completing challenges or by advancing your Season Level. We’ll cover both in turn.
Challenges:
There are two types of challenges: daily and weekly. Daily Challenges are randomly assigned and usually straightforward: getting kills with a certain weapon, outlasting opponents in a particular mode, and so forth. All Daily Challenges get you 5 Battle Stars and 500 Season XP, which we’ll cover in the level section. As you might have guessed, you get one every day, and you can only store three at once. That means that if a new day comes and you’ve already got three challenges, you’ll miss out on the opportunity to get those stars.
When it comes to Daily Challenges, I’d recommend ditching particularly difficult challenges if you don’t expect to be able to sign in every day. You don’t want to miss out on something easy like outlasting opponents in Solo Mode because you’re hoping to get a Sniper kill. If you’re staying on top of things and completing the easy ones as they come up, however, feel free to sit on a hard one until you can manage it.
Weekly challenges are a little different. There are seven every week, and they’re the same for all players. Some of these are easy for less-skilled players, and don’t require any combat at all: they ask you to find certain locations in the world and either collect a piece of treasure, perform an action, or just visit the location. There’s also one every week that asks you to open treasure chests in a given location. Others are much harder, asking you to get kills or do damage with particular weapons, or to get kills in a particular location.
Out of the seven weekly challenges, 4 will reward 5 Battle Stars and 500 XP. 3 are deemed “hard” and will award 10 Battle Stars and 1,000 XP. Completing any four of a week’s given challenges will net you 5,000 XP. It’s important to remember that Weekly Challenges don’t expire until the end of the season: you can complete Week 1′s challenges at any time from now until the end of Week 10.
In addition to the weekly challenges, there’s one set of “starter” challenges that only show up once per season. These are a good source of early Tiers and XP, and are all pretty straightforward save one: Win a Match. Once you’ve finished those, however, there isn’t a second set.
Season Level:
What, you might ask, is all that XP being used for? Good question. Experience goes to the Season Level, which you can see in the upper left of the main lobby screen. Like in other games, leveling starts pretty quick and then slows down, and later levels will take a whole lot of XP to hit. You can gain XP either by completing challenges, as covered above, or just through normal play. As you might have guessed, you get XP bonuses for surviving longer, killing opponents and winning matches. If you’ve already done all your available challenges, increasing your Season Level is going to be your only avenue towards leveling up your Battle Pass.
That’s because increasing your Season Level also earns you Battle Stars. It’s 2 for a normal level, 5 for hitting a multiple of 5, and 10 for hitting a multiple of 10 — which are also multiples of 5, I know, but you get it.
If you’re already at Tier 100, leveling up gets you XP bonuses instead. That’s still useful because Season 4 comes with several skins that unlock new pieces of armor along with higher Season Levels.
Be smart about playtime: With this knowledge in hand, leveling up is really just about playing, winning, and succeeding. If you have limited playtime and are trying to level up the pass, try to be smart about how you go about things. If, for example, you’re having a hard time with a treasure chest or location kill challenge, wait until the next week when less people will be dropping in.
Also try to do more than one challenge at once, maybe by taking a particular weapon to the location where you need kills, or by hunting down other players trying to open treasure chests. But don’t stress out about weapon kill challenges: if you wait long enough you’ll get another challenge that asks you to do damage with that weapon, or maybe a Daily Challenge that asks you to also get kills with that weapon. If you’re lucky, you can be working towards three challenges at once.
It’s tempting to want to complete all the challenges as they’re made available, but you can make yourself crazy that way. It might be a better use of your time to play normally for a little bit until a few weeks’ worth of challenges are available. Then you can go back and try to complete multiple challenges at once, or just complete some challenges that are a little easier now that the heat has died down.
Other than that, don’t stress. Stress is a killer in Fortnite. Keep a level head and just try to be aware of where you are, where your enemies are, and what you need to do to kill them.
