'Fortnite' Season 9: What Are Fortbyte Challenges? Here's How They Work

Fortnite: Battle Royale Season 9 launched Thursday morning with a futuristic theme that brought floating sky platforms and an air-powered transportation system called the Slipstream to the game. But one of the biggest surprises is something called “Fortbyte” that appears as a unique set of challenges in the game’s menu next to Utopia, the Discovery replacement.

“Collect Fortbytes to decrypt the mystery!” the caption reads. From the looks of it, an individual Fortbyte is one part of a 100-piece puzzle that, once assembled, reveal some kind of image. Collecting 90 Fortbytes also awards players with a Legendary outfit related to the Utopia challenges, roughly the equivalent of Season 8’s Ruin skin.

Each Fortbyte equates to a single challenge. So far, most are linked to tiers in the premium battle pass, gaining enough experience, completing a particular number of challenges in a specific week, or finishing in the top 10 a certain number of times in any game mode. All of this translates to “play a lot of Fortnite and be good at it,” but there are already some anomalies and a lot of Fortbytes that remain shrouded in mystery.

Most of the Fortbytes are locked and labeled as “corrupted data” right now, but it looks like one Fortbyte will decrypt every day at 9 a.m. Eastern. Around 82 Fortbytes are currently encrypted despite Season 9 being currently scheduled to end on July 23 in 75 days. Could that be a secret indication that Season 9 will actually end a week later instead?

Number 36 is “accessible by Sentinel on a frozen island” and number 13 is “found at a location hidden within loading screen number 2.” This second one presumably references the second Utopia loading screen that’ll be unlockable this time next week.

These two challenges make Fortbytes seem like a fusion of jigsaw puzzle pieces or Season 8’s treasure map loading screen challenges, but there’s no telling what kinds of tasks might appear throughout the rest of the season.