Building in Lego Fortnite Can Feel Restrictive

As well as having reached a concurrent player count of over two million and being a major argument for Fortnite as a media platform, Lego Fortnite also returns to the game’s roots as a building game with survival elements. But despite the game’s explosive success and charming appearance, there are a few issues with that mar its accessibility focused appeal.

Like its peers Valheim, Ark, The Forest, etc., building is a major part of Lego Fortnite, and to be fair to the game its ‘Builds’ system serves as a pretty great tutorial. Simply gather your materials, place down a schematic for your building design of choice and snap the components into place. But as useful as it is, many players will want to move on from these ready-made blueprints to designing their own structures and towers, and unfortunately that’s where Lego Fortnite falls into a bit of a snare.

See, in say Minecraft nearly everything fitting into that same size of block means most objects are functionally 1×1. You have doors and other things that might be 2×1 or even 3×1 but generally most things work on that framework and it’s simple enough you barely have to think about it.

But in Lego Fortnite, you’re working with several different dimensions, for example your average wall being 2 Lego studs wide, 16 long, and 12 high. That means all of a sudden you’ve going to have to be paying attention to these individual little studs because if you get it wrong your house’s roof isn’t going to meet in the middle. And because everything is in these set dimensions, you can’t always just fill it in with smaller roofing pieces because you’re stuck working with the sizes given to you. You can’t fill a 1×4 gap with only 2×4 blocks, to say nothing of the way many particular dimensions are weirdly progress-gated in Survival mode. Sometimes you’ll unlock a new piece of a particular style, only for the half-sized version to be locked behind several more village upgrades.

To top it off are a number of other small annoyances. Once placed down, your structures and equipment must be broken down again if you decide they’d be better situated elsewhere. While you get all the resources back, breaking them requires slowly punching them or using durability from tools that could have been spent gathering new resources. Not to mention, if you were trying to fill in some gap with smaller pieces, you’d have to punch each tiny piece several times individually to clear them up.

So what could Epic do to solve these problems? Well, making placed items easier to break is just as likely to result in accidentally damaging your builds, but a dedicated dismantling tool would work, especially with a wide-range option. Then, a way to measure out lengths would go a long way, since counting Minecraft blocks is a fair bit easier than tiny Lego studs. The dimensions thing is a little trickier, you could simply add more variations, but that would lead to bloat of an already large catalogue and there’ll always be some minor style missing. A way to create custom sized pieces or simply click-and-drag to fill a selected space would work, but I’ve no idea on the implementation feasability. It may just be something that players have to learn to live with, but it’s an unfortunate design oversight that goes against the game’s greatest strengths: accessibility and simplicity.

Lego Fortnite is available now for the PC, Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.