‘Fortnite’ Servers Going Down For Maintenance Tomorrow Ahead Of Shopping Carts, Week 5 Challenges

We got away with no downtime last week, but no such luck this week. After some confusion this morning, Epic Games announced that Fortnite: Battle Royale would have regular downtime for maintenance before update v4.3. The game will be unavailable at 4:00 a.m. ET on Wednesday, May 30. As usual, there is no scheduled uptime, but 1-2 hours is never a bad guess.

In past weeks, new challenges have arrived immediately after server downtime, but that’s not the case this week. Epic is moving the new challenges to 4:00 a.m. Thursday morning, the same time they would arrive during Season 3.

The big thing coming tomorrow is shopping carts, announced on the in-game news feed this afternoon. And while not much is known about the new items, it certainly looks like they’re going to be not just a new item for the game, but an entirely new item class: vehicles. Ever since launch, the lack of vehicles has been one of the biggest differentiators between the game and its chief competition, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. Now, however, Epic appears to be adding vehicles in a particularly strange, particularly Fortnite sort of way, and it’s exciting to see how that’s going to happen. There are still a lot of questions about just how shopping carts will work when they arrive, so stay tuned for that.

Other than that it’s not entirely clear what’s coming down the pike, though we Epic did give us some idea of what it’s working on in a developer update earlier this week. Most exciting is the prospect of a new “playroom” mode that lets you spawn onto the island with a group of friends in a non-competitive setting that lets you practice building and shooting to your heart’s content. Friendly fire will be active, allowing you to scrimmage against your friends before being safely respawned. It’s the sort of mode that people have been asking for since launch, and Epic indicates that its a test run for a more extensive creative mode to come.

It’s also possible that tomorrow could see the return of the refund system, which Epic introduced a while ago but then quickly disabled due to technical issues.

Other than that, as the usual set of bug fixes and quality of life improvements large and small: of particular note is a new challenge tracking system. Check back tomorrow morning for patch notes.