‘Fortnite’ Is Back Online: Here’s What You Need To Know About Chapter 4, Season 1

Updated 12/04/22. See update below.

Fortnite has gone offline following an epic—if slightly too-long—live-event that saw the destruction of the Chapter 3 map and the piecing together of the new Chapter 4 map, courtesy of the Paradigm.

The event itself was pretty cool. You’re in space, basically, with several small floating islands hovering around the Zero Point—that giant glowing orb in the picture above.

Your goal here was to gather energy orbs to funnel power into the Zero Point so that Paradigm could use it to power her Map construction. To do this you had to find orbs around the map and complete mini-games and challenges such as:

• Matching props around the floating islands, like flamingos.
• Watching flashbacks of previous live-events like the rocket and the Mech vs Monster battle.
• Running NPC quests like building a snowman, throwing a chicken into the Zero Point and so forth.

As the Paradigm roped in more and more islands, new areas to explore became available, along with more places to find orbs.

I think I got to 44 points by the end of the event. I recorded the whole thing but the video footage is corrupted or I’d share it with you here. I’m actually pretty frustrated about this!

As the final cinematic played out we glimpsed a few familiar faces—the same skins I wrote about leaking ahead of the event: Geralt Of Rivia, Mr. Beast, The Hulk, DOOM Guy and what looks to be the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and characters from Toy Story.

The new map looks pretty sweet! I’m excited to dive back in as I really haven’t played much of lately and didn’t play very much of Chapter 3 this past year. Maybe this can breathe some new life into the game.

While the prop-hunting and whatnot was fun, it might have been more fun if we’d also gotten a massive co-op battle against The Herald first instead of just a cinematic. Oh well! I still had fun.

The event ended with the below cinematic:

When Does Fortnite Come Back Online?

We don’t have an exact time right now, but according to the Xbox in-game message Chapter 4 starts on December 4th. That means the earliest servers could come back online would be midnight ET / 9pm PT. I think it’s more likely that servers will go live in the middle of the night, around 3am ET / midnight PT. In other words: Servers will be live when you wake up tomorrow morning and download the new update.

Epic Games rarely announce the exact time for servers to come back online, and in the past they’ve made players wait for days between seasons. That doesn’t look to be the case here. If we get more solid times, I’ll update this post. If for some reason the game doesn’t come back online tomorrow, I’ll update this post. For now, your best bet is either staying up later or—if you’re wise—getting a good night’s sleep and jumping in tomorrow morning.

Right now I can’t even login to Fortnite and I’m apparently logged out of my Epic Game Store on my PC despite just playing the game! I’m getting login errors which I assume are related to the game update. Very weird. Anyways, more to come . . . .

Stay tuned!

Update: Servers Are Back Online!

Fortnite: Battle Royale is back online after a long period of downtime. While the game was offline for half the day yesterday and much of the night, this is still a short downtime compared to the end of Chapter 1 and beginning of Chapter 2, when Fortnite disappeared into a black hole and servers didn’t fire back up for several days.

That’s a stunt Epic Games may not want to risk a second time. Going offline for 12 or 15 hours builds hype and anticipation; going offline for four days could drive gamers into the arms of another title.

In any case, lots is new in Fortnite today as we have Chapter 4, Season 1 to explore. This includes:

• A brand new map with all-new Points Of Interest to explore (plus some new ones).
• A new Battle Pass with a bunch of new skins including The Witcher’s Geralt of Rivia and the Doom Slayer from DOOM. Check out all those skins right here.
• In-season, Epic will be releasing Creative 2.0 which allows Fortnite players to mess around with the power of Unreal Engine 5 to create . . . we’ll see! Marvelous things, no doubt! Creative should really come into its own next month when this launches.
• Motorcycles! At last! You can now drive around on two wheels for the first time. I can’t believe it’s taken Epic Games this long, to be honest. Better late than never . . . .
• New weapons like the Twin Mag SMG, Tactical Pistol, Thunder Shotgun, Maven Auto Shotgun and Red-Eye Assault Rifle. Also a Shock Hammer and a sword-rifle combo called the Ex-Caliber Rifle (which is clever Arthurian punning, I must admit).
• Unvaulted weapons like the SCAR. The Tactical AR is returning soon also, this time with a Red-Dot Sight with an orange tint.
• Loot Drones
• A new Slap Juice consumable that gives you faster stamina regeneration.
• New Default Skins
• A new victory umbrella.

And lots more! I’m diving into the map today to get a better sense of everything that’s new in the game and will round it up in a separate post later here on this blog. Stay tuned! We also have all the Christmas festivities to look forward to soon enough, so even more changes are on the way.

What do you think of the new Chapter and Season so far? Let me know on Twitter or Facebook.