Ahead of this weekend’s giant alien-infused Ariana Grande concert, the mothership that has been over the Fortnite map since the season launched is now getting a bit…hungry.
The ship is now starting to abduct not just individual players, who previously could bounce around inside the mothership for a fun little minigame during matches, but now entire POIs on the map.
Right now, it’s starting with Slurpy Swamp, and you can now head over to the abduction zone which is being eaten alive and sucked up into the belly of the ship slowly.
The entire zone is now a low gravity area, meaning your jumps now go 5x as high or so, and pieces of the map are starting to float up into the air toward the ship. You can still loot it like a normal zone, and there aren’t many enemy troops around, but yeah, the geometry has certainly changed.
It’s a cool effect, and reportedly it will continue to change as the hours and days go on. I’m not sure if it’s going to just be a hole in the ground once it’s done being abducted, but it’s cool to visit right now and see some neat effects like SLURP being sucked up into the air as it spills out of pipes. The little details really make the scene.
I’m not sure how many zones in total are going to be abducted by the time this is said and done, but I remember hearing that Coral Castle is another zone that’s going to get sucked up too, so maybe that’s next after this one. My guess is that this process will likely be done by the time Ariana’s concert starts, so it may start to accelerate rather quickly.
This is going to be a cool event, whether it’s tied to the Rift Tour or not, a slow change to the map paving the way for these zones to be replaced by something else in the future. Why is the mothership collecting zones? (it already has a number of older ones inside of it that it has clearly taken from other parallel islands). That’s unclear, but this is the most engaged I’ve been with a Fortnite “storyline” for quite some time now. Keep an eye on these zones as they start to dissemble, and we will have to see how all this culminates by the Rift Tour on Friday.
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