How to Get Essence in LEGO Fortnite

The new LEGO Fortnite update is here and with it comes a big change to how players can augment their tools. Essence is a new resource in LEGO Fortnite that you can use to apply runes to your weapons and tools. It’s a must-have in order to give yourself a helpful boon while exploring the world and upgrading your village. Here’s how to collect essence in LEGO Fortnite, and what to do with it once you’ve gained enough of it.

In LEGO Fortnite, you collect essence naturally by performing various actions. There’s no need to worry, however, as all the actions that yield essence are necessary to progress through the game. You can gain essence by collecting resources and defeating enemies, ensuring you’ll have plenty of essence to use by the time you unlock the Rune Forge. There’s a limit to how much essence you can carry at once, so it’s best to build a rune forge sooner rather than later.

How to use Essence in LEGO Fortnite

You can use essence at rune forges to upgrade your tools with a wide assortment of runes. These runes bestow upon the tool different passive abilities that can improve its overall utility. To unlock the rune forge, you need to find glass first, which unlocks the recipe. You then need 20 knotwood and 6 glass to build the rune forge itself. Once built, you can interact with the rune forge to “roll” for various runes you can upgrade your tools with. There are seven runes total:

• Rune of Damage
• Rune of Berserk
• Rune of Health
• Rune of Luck
• Rune of Undead Bane
• Rune of Destruction
• Rune of Durability

Click the roll button to randomly generate three runes from this list. You can then select a tool and apply one of those runes to it for a certain amount of essence. Once you’ve applied the rune to your tool, the other runes will disappear. If you don’t like the runes you rolled, you can reroll new runes at the cost of 50 essence. A tool can’t have more than one of the same kind of rune applied to it, so rerolling for the same runes isn’t beneficial. However, as long as you don’t apply the runes to a tool, you can always save your currently generated runes for a different tool later.

Upgrading your tools with runes is one of the best ways to optimize their efficiency. Make sure to read our guide on the Best LEGO Fortnite Runes to use on Weapons for more information on runes and how they work. Not all runes are immediately available. For more on how to unlock new runes, read our guide here.

LEGO Fortnite is free for Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, PC, and Android.