The purpose of building in Fortnite
is to find advantages in fights
and to move safely in any direction.
You can use building to win individual battles
or to win whole matches.
You can use the clickable sections below
to keep track of what step you're on during this tutorial.
There are four structures that you can place in Fortnite:
walls, floors, ramps, and cones.
On your building quick bar, found above your weapons,
you will find a row of inputs
indicating which button you need to press
in order to place each build.
You can change the shape of each structure by using edits.
Press your edit button and select the tiles you want to edit
by pressing left click on a mouse
or right trigger on a controller.
To start using building to win fights and stay safe,
the first step is to practice building a box.
First, look straight down and spin
to place four walls around yourself.
If you don't aim straight down,
you might build walls too far away.
By looking down,
you can guarantee that the four walls
will be placed as closely as possible.
Once you build the walls,
jump and place a cone under your feet
and a cone above your head.
Finally, make sure to place a floor above and below.
Now that you've built a box,
you can use it to find good angles while fighting.
With a friend or with a target dummy in creative mode,
practice building a box and making wall edits.
In most situations, a simple right window edit
will create a favorable isolated shooting angle
for fighting in close, medium, or long range.
Middle windows are OK,
but they give you less space to duck behind cover.
Every angle you look for should be a right-hand peek.
If you shoot by moving to the right of cover,
your opponent will not be able to shoot back.
To make a right window edit, press your edit key,
select the right middle tile from the edit grid,
confirm the edit, pull out a weapon,
and move to the right until you find the smallest,
safest angle to shoot a target outside of your box.
Once you can comfortably shoot targets outside of your box
with simple wall edits,
you need to learn to use building to move around a fight
while keeping yourself safe.
The simplest strategy is called re-boxing.
These patterns are the most optimal ways
to build a box in all six directions,
left, right, up, down, forward, and back.
For every direction,
you should practice shooting your shotgun
before moving into a new box.
The most important pattern to practice
is re-boxing to the left.
First, fire a shotgun, then protect yourself
by editing the front two tiles of your cone.
Next, look to your left and edit
the top left three tiles of your wall.
As the wall opens, exit your box
while placing three walls surrounding yourself.
Finally, place floors and cones above and below.
From this position,
you can look back at your cone and reset the edit.
This creates an excellent angle
to shoot an aggressive opponent.
This strategy can also be used against a player
pressuring your box from high ground.
As the player breaks the cone and floor above,
shoot them and protect yourself by looking down
to edit the closest tile of your cone.
Look to your left
and edit the bottom left three tiles of your wall.
Build a new box and then reset your original cone
to find a favorable right-hand-peek angle
against the player above you.
Re-boxing to the right or backward
will look identical to leftward re-boxing,
but they do not give you
the same right-hand-peek advantage.
Building a new box up and down gets a bit more difficult.
To re-box downward,
look straight down to edit one tile of your cone and floor.
As you fall, place a wall
and catch yourself with a floor and cone.
Build three more walls to complete the box
and look up to reset the floor above you.
To re-box upward, stand on the back left of your box
and edit the front two tiles of your cone.
Look straight up to edit the floor and cone above,
and then place four walls with a cone on top.
From here, jump and quickly reset
the edits on your floor and cone.
This strategy keeps you in a familiar position to shoot,
cone edit, and re-box in a new direction.
As a beginner-level player, moving forward aggressively
should be the last thing you learn to do.
The slowest but safest way to move forward
is by building a box without entering the box.
Edit the top right three tiles of the wall in front of you,
crouch behind the wall,
and look up to place a floor outside.
While aiming at that floor, place three walls.
Finally, aim at the right wall
to place a cone above and inside that next box.
The easier way to move forward is by placing cones
and editing through walls, like this.
This strategy is faster, but it's not very safe.
As long as you place cones and stand on them,
you will always be able to block an angle
and use one of your re-boxing drills
to fully protect yourself.
If you practice the drills in this video,
you should be able to slowly accomplish
every building goal in Fortnite.
By using these drills,
you can climb to high ground or drop to low ground;
you can play excellent defense by safely moving left,
right, or backwards;
and, finally, you can play aggressively
and find good right-hand-peek angles.
Check out our Fortnite playlist on our page
to learn more game tips.