Learning how to stay alive

Your reflexes are shot and your handeye coordination is dodgy – so how do you keep up with the kids in the world’s biggest video game? Keith Stuart outlines 13 rules of survival.

YOUR kids are playing it, your friends are complaining about their kids playing it, and the some parts of the media are telling you noone should be playing it because it’s evil. But the fact is,

Fortnite is here, it’s lots of fun, and if you can’t beat its 40 million players you may as well join them.

Fortnite is a ‘‘battle royale’’ game in which 100 players land on an island, run around collecting weapons, resources and items from abandoned houses, build forts for protection, and then attempt to blast each other right back into the starting menu. The last player standing wins.

When you first start out, it can be a little bewildering — but not nearly as bewildering as not playing and then trying to understand what your daughter means when she tells you she just took out two John Wicks with nothing but an uncommon silenced pistol.

If you’re thinking of dipping your toe in, here are 13 tips to get you started.

Stay on the battle bus until the end

If you want to live long enough to collect a couple of guns and some resources, stay on the bus until the last few seconds and then land somewhere near the coast. Very few players will be around, because most of them eject immediately over Tilted Towers. This way, you at least get to arm yourself and have a little look around before being pulverised by a stranger dressed like Harley Quinn from Suicide Squad.

Land on a roof when you eject from the battle bus

You’ll want to land near a house, where you’re most likely to find weapons and chests. But it’s even better to land on the roof. This gives you a height advantage on anyone else nearby, and also means you can quickly chop your way through each floor, grabbing all the goodies from the top of the house to the bottom.

Prioritise weapons over resources in the opening seconds

As soon as you’ve landed, you need to find something useful to fight with just in case someone else has dropped nearby — you don’t want to be running at them with your pickaxe. At this stage anything will do, although a tactical shotgun or submachine gun will be best because it’s likely to be a close encounter. Don’t engage anyone unless you really have to. You’re not Rambo.

Learn about weapon grading

There are five grades of weapon in

Fortnite: gray (common), green (uncommon), blue (rare), purple (epic) and orange (legendary). With each grade, the weapon’s damage capabilities improve, so always prioritise rarer weapons.

Learn to make a basic fort

As quickly as possible while you’re exploring the world, start smashing stuff up to get you the three basic resources: wood, bricks and metal. Wood is the weakest but also the quickest to build with, so, if someone is firing at you, this is what to go for first. The basic defence is to surround yourself with four walls, then build a ramp in the middle and jump on to it as its forming. This gives you height and cover. Building other identical levels on top of this will accentuate your height advantage, but only