Fortnite used to have a giant purple Cube rolling around the map, now it has a less-giant floating rune platform floating around the map in a similar fashion. This time, however, things are different. Players are tasked with damaging the rune however they can to “motivate” it to move after hacking through 500 million HP across every game server. It used to be 100 million, but that was too fast, so Epic changed it. Then it was 1.5 billion, and that was too slow, so here we are.
Everyone has assumed that the rune is heading toward the weird device/ship/whatever it is that has been unearthed at Loot Lake. The rune on the platform matches the rune that is currently active at the lake, and so it stands to reason the device will make its way over there and slide into a slot meant for it, before this happens five more times with other symbols.
But the rune might cause a little mayhem first.
One of the problems with the rune is that it’s hard to track, at least harder than the giant purple Cube, so I’ve been waking up and looking on Twitter to see where it currently is. The path it’s taking to Loot Lake is a winding, not a terribly direct one. Originally people thought it was following the Cube path, but that isn’t true, and it’s been in the frozen part of the map for a few days now, which didn’t even exist in the Cube era.
But it is getting closer to Loot Lake, and now, this morning, it’s actually taken aim at Tilted Towers, and you know what that means.
Every season, there is some sort of calamity that befalls one specific building in Tilted Towers, so much so that it’s a meme at this point. Earthquakes, the Cube, meteors, this building has the worst luck on earth, so everyone believes that the rune will be heading straight for it and crash through it, taking it down for the fourth or fifth time at this point.
The building is currently an insurance office, which is ironic. One catch to this theory however is that so far, unlike the Cube, I don’t think we’ve actually seen the rune destroy anything. It floats around and stays to open areas, not smashing its way through structures. So it would actually be pretty out of character (can runes have character?) to smash through the Tilted building. I would say that Epic might have it brush by the building without actually hitting it, and have that be a fake-out so it can be destroyed in some other way later.
I don’t know if I’m a fan of this new mystery. The rune is going real slow and taking a really long time to get where it has to obviously be going, Loot Lake. And now we have to do this four more times? While I do want to see what happens when all five runes get there, it seems weird to have players damage these things to move them for weeks when we clearly know where they are all going in the end, which is no great mystery. And “contributing” to this is annoying because it can be hard to find if you’re not paying attention. Someone may have built a tracking website for it, but I haven’t found one yet.
Just sort of a weird activity if you ask me, and too similar to the Cube era where we had the Cube rolling and then the shards moving toward Loot Lake after that. But I do want to know what happens at the end of all this, of course.
Update: I was right, the rune is trolling. It went straight at the building and then OVER it, because this thing does not actually run into stuff. I still bet this will be destroyed later, but this was funny.
Update 2: The rune is back down to 100 million HP and moving quick toward its final resting place at Loot Lake. Maybe, 20 more minutes at this pace? I did see it take down a tree, so it can crush stuff. That may have been an accident.
Update 3: The rune went inside the matching symbol part of the device and turned on this glowing…engine thing. One other rune already seems to be in place next to it, as it’s sticking up, but inactive.
Update 4: There was a shake as this happened, and apparently the volcano is now smoking. So this may indeed be linked to the volcano/Ruin after all.
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