Fortnite's Biggest Unsolved Mysteries

If you're only playing Fortnite in order to win another hard-earned Victory Royale, you're missing out. Oh, sure, Fortnite: Battle Royale's 100-player winner-takes-all slugfests are among some of the most exciting, silliest, and just plain best things going in gaming. There's a reason why Fortnite has seemingly taken over the world. It's really dang fun.

But there's a lot more to Epic Games' incredibly popular take on the battle royale genre: in addition to the player-versus-player mayhem, it's got a story. A good one, even. You might just have to work a little to find it. As it turns out, Fortnite's alliterated map is chock full of secrets, and many fans spend just as much time trying to unravel the game's many mysteries as they have shooting at each other. Here are the mysteries that we can't wait to see solved, but be warned: in Fortnite, every answer leads to more questions. The rabbit hole is very, very deep.

At long last, Fortnite's mysterious pink cube is gone. It didn't go quietly. In the beginning, the cube seemed like a force of nature, slowly moving towards Loot Lake while destroying everything in its path. Before long, however, it started to show its true colors. At the beginning of Season 6, the cube powered a moving, floating island, while the runes it left in its wake created shadow stones that transformed players into wraiths. Eventually, the island shattered, and in the Fortnitemares special event, cube fragments started spawning zombies — sorry, Cube Monsters — that ran amok on Fortnite's odd little island.

Clearly, "Kevin" was up to no good, but its reign of terror didn't last long. Just as the Cube Monster invasion began to wind down, the cube began running out of juice. Cracks started appearing on the cube. Its days were numbered. The final, fatal blow landed on Nov. 4, 2018, when the cube, seemingly overwhelmed by power, exploded during a special in-game event. That was it. The cube was finally gone.

The questions that the cube raised, however, remain. Shattering the cube didn't seem to get rid of those zombies — sorry, Cube Monsters — as the creatures stuck around for another limited-time event. It disappeared before players learned whether or not the cube was part of the Visitor's grand scheme, what the shadow stones and runes actually meant, or why the cube started an interdimensional invasion. Kevin the Cube clearly had a plan, but it's still not clear what that was — and now that it's gone, we'll never know the truth. Bummer.

In Fortnite: Battle Royale, players fall from the sky onto a mysterious and deadly island filled with all kinds of mysteries. Sound familiar? Then you probably watched Lost, the '00s television phenomenon that hooked millions of viewers with its soap opera-esque drama, unconventional storytelling structure, and unexplainable weirdness. Heck, like Lost, Fortnite: Battle Royale  even has its own mysterious hatch, which suddenly appeared in Fortnite's Wailing Woods in May 2018.

A number of months later, the hatch still isn't open, but fans think they know what's inside anyway — and, once again, your Lost-sense should be tingling. As of Fortnite Season 6, there's not just a hatch in the Wailing Woods. Now, there's a whole bunker, and if you head inside, you'll find not just a network of tunnels but an entire research facility, kind of like the one that the Lost crew found at the beginning of the show's second season. Like the Dharma Initiative, it looks like Fortnite's still-unknown scientists were trying to harness their island's mysterious power, too: you can find one of Fortnite's rifts in one of the bunker's laboratories. So, yeah, that's ominous.

Many fans assume that the hatch and the bunker are related by virtue of geography alone. The bunker isn't the only underground secret that Wailing Woods is hiding, either: busting through some of Wailing Woods' brand new cabins reveals a network of tunnels, some of which haven't fully opened yet. Could there more secrets lurking in Fortnite's subterranean depths?

At first, it seemed like a bug. When Fortnite: Battle Royale's 3.4 patch hit in late March, people playing on Xbox One and PlayStation 4 noticed that their controllers were randomly vibrating. Most players dismissed this as a glitch. Epic even said as much. The only option, the developer said, was to turn the force feedback on controllers off, to make sure that the unwanted shakes didn't interfere with all of the game's good old-fashioned killing.

But it wasn't a mistake. It was a message. As Reddit user Vigilancefoetracer discovered, the seemingly random vibrations were actually Morse code. After some quick decoding, Vigilancefoetracer deduced that someone calling for help. See, the translated message read "SOS D 5 418." Players quickly figured out what the first two parts of the code meant: D5 is the region of Fortnite's map where the Tilted Towers reside, while SOS is self-explanatory. The "418" was less obvious. Most people surmised that it was a date (April, 2018), and concluded that Twisted Towers would be destroyed by Fortnite's encroaching meteors sometime that month.

They were partly correct. A meteor shower did indeed hit Fortnite at the end of April, but the Towers (mostly) survived. Meanwhile, fans still don't know who sent the message, or how that individual knew about the meteor strike ahead of time. At this rate, they may never figure it out.

Not all of Fortnite's mysteries come from the stars. A few have their roots in the past. Fortnite Season 5 introduced time travel to the game's increasingly complex storyline, but even before that, the game's been signaling that some of your favorite prehistoric creatures aren't as extinct as you think they are.

So, yeah, dinosaurs. We're talking about dinosaurs. Shortly before Season 5 began, a large animal skeleton appeared in Moisty Mire (which, as of Season 5, has been dried out and transformed into a desert), but even before that, there have been hints that so-called "terrible lizards" are lurking somewhere in Fortnite's world. Just a few days after Fortnite's meteor shower, fans found a giant footprint lurking just south of Snobby Shores, near where a house used to be. It's not the first time that the ancient critters have made an appearance in the game, either. Not only can fans purchase stylish Rex and Tricera Ops skins, but they could earn a dinosaur skull banner icon during the game's third season.

Of course, the whole dinosaur thing could just be some Hollywood magic. After all, the footprint is surrounded by one of the film sets that appeared during Season 4. At this point, it's hard to say exactly what's going on. That's what makes it a mystery!

Now, here's where things get really interesting. As previously mentioned, a meteor shower served as Season 4's big climax — and when the rocks started falling, Fortnite's real mysteries began. To begin with, these clearly aren't regular meteors. After particularly large meteorite demolished Dusty Depot, a shady government agency set up a camp around the interstellar projectile and started studying its effects. In addition, the impact site was surrounded by "hop rocks," physics-altering materials that launched players into the air. That's not normal. Something funny must be going on.

Things cleared up a little bit during the seventh week of Season 4, when it turned out that there was an escape pod in the meteor's core — and that whoever was riding in it escaped. According to Fortnite's Season 4 loading screens, which relay Fortnite: Battle Royale's story, the mysterious passenger is actually The Visitor, a strange character who also happens to be one of the special skins that Fortnite players can earn. After exiting the meteor, the Visitor made a beeline for Fortnite's supervillain hideout, where he launched the rocket that helped bring Season 4 to a close.

But who is The Visitor, and where did he — or she — come from? Are his motives pure, or is he up to no good? So far, that's all still unknown, although some of Fortnite's other mysteries might hold some answers.

Maybe there's one big mystery that ties all of Fortnite: Battle Royale's various unknowns together. Maybe this is all related, and maybe it's building to one giant revelation — one with intergalactic origins.

Outside of the Visitor, aliens haven't played an immediately obvious role in Fortnite's evolving story, but little hints have popped up here and there that indicate that extraterrestrials are very, very involved in the ongoing plot. There's the aforementioned hidden message. Before the meteor struck, players saw UFOs hovering around the descending objects. At least one Fortnite resident must've seen 'em too, because they left a heart sign welcoming the aliens to Earth on a Tilted Towers rooftop. During the rocket launch, some players heard alien-like voices. When Kotaku asked what the meteor was, Epic responded with a picture of Giorgio A. Tsoukalos, a television personality best known for spouting insane theories on the History Channel's Ancient Aliens.

Those small pieces add up, and if there's not something otherworldly going on in Fortnite, we're going to be very, very surprised. Look at it this way: if Thanos, a native of the planet Titan, can make an appearance in Fortnite, it stands to reason that other visitors may not be far behind. Heck, we've already met one of 'em. From all indications, that's just the tip of the iceberg.