Update: There was a vent down there, and looks like we’re mostly done. I was hoping for more!
Update: The skeleton is now fully uncovered, and there’s a teddy bear inside of it. Also, you can get an angle in near those rocks where it looks like things might go pretty far down.
Update: A rock broke, and there’s a truck down there. Beneath the truck is an unbreakable bottom, but it might go deeper elsewhere in the hole.
Things are getting real in Season 8, finally. It’s been a pretty tame few weeks for Fortnite here, but a new development in the southeastern corner of the map might point to the first real movement we’re seeing with whatever is going on with this Pirates/Ninjas/Dragons/Fire Warriors/A bunch of other folk conflict. It’s an excavation site that just popped up near the desert biome, and it’s more active than you might guess. You can actually hop into the pit and start digging with your pickaxe, slowly doing damage at all the rocks down in there. You’ll notice that each rock comes with a colossal HP bar that goes down as you hit it. What you’re seeing is every player in Fortnite doing damage to that rock at the same time, and your strikes are just a small part of it.
What’s down at the bottom? We’ll just have to see. Here’s where it is:
Astute readers will remember that we saw something very similar last season with an Iceberg that took real-time damage back in Season 7. That had all the markings of a technical test: it was stuck on an island separate from the main landmass where few players would casually find it unless they were specifically looking. And when all was said and done there was nothing interesting beneath it, just another one of those Lost-style mystery hatches.
There’s reason to believe that the iceberg was a technical test for what we’re seeing today (in addition to other things later on). Placing the excavation site on the main island means that players are going to find this thing on their own, and the pit itself is more elaborate. We’re now doing damage to individual rocks rather than the whole mass at once, so it’s going to be easier to envision progress as we start making our way to the bottom of the pit. Also worth noting that it doesn’t seem you can do damage with weapons this time around: this is pickaxe only.
There are already some bones sticking up out of some of these rocks, so we’ll at least see that. But there are likely more interesting treasures down there too. I still maintain that this whole “every player does damage to a single target” concept is a dry run for a full-scale world boss, and who knows? There might be some great monster hiding down there at the bottom.
