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Fortnite Battle Royale overhauls map, adds new city

Swallow your Fibre and get Plunked on

A big Fortnite Battle Royale update today re-landscapes the map in the free-to-play Plunkbat fan game that all the cool kids are surely calling Fibre. The world overhaul drops a new city into the world, along with a new mine, a few other new places, and more variety across the land thanks to different biomes. Other big changes in today's patch include disabling friendly fire (for now, anyway) and improving performance.

The map update focuses on the western side of the island because there was naff all there before so players largely avoided it. Now the empty area has sprouted Junk Junction, Haunted Hills, Snobby Shores, and a few other little settlements. And the south-west gets the new Shifty Shafts mine. Here's a snap of the new map layout, and here's the old one for comparison.

You can see some of the new areas up-close in this video from Epic:

Cover image for YouTube video

The V.2.2.0 patch notes also detail changes to the Scoped AR, UI changes, various performance improvements, bug fixes, prettier distant trees, voice chat in the pre-game lobby, and other odds and ends. As for disabling friendly fire, meaning you can no longer murder your chums, Epic say "This is exploratory and subject to change."

It's still wild to me that Epic spent almost six years working on Fortnite between announcing Fortnite and first releasing it, and it looked destined to quietly fade away until they quickly whipped up a new mode riffing on the latest hot trend. Not that Fibre is bad, mind, but jesus, six years. Six years! And then almost no one cares about the base game, only its Plunking. Fibre certainly has found the attention Fortnite couldn't, with Epic claiming it has seen over forty million players. They say its record concurrent player count is over two million - short of Plunkbat's numbers, but it's not a competition and these are certainly numbers a free-to-play game can be proud of. The news is bad for Epic's Paragon, though, as they have drafted some people from its dev team to help out on Fibre, making the MOBA's future look even more grim.

If you fancy getting some Fibre in you, you can download it through Epic's client.

Still trying to get to grips with Fortnite? Check out our Fortnite guide hub for more tips and tricks for the game. You can also find the latest challenges in our Fortnite week 6 challenges guide.

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Alice O'Connor

Associate Editor

Alice has been playing video games since SkiFree and writing about them since 2009, with nine years at RPS. She enjoys immersive sims, roguelikelikes, chunky revolvers, weird little spooky indies, mods, walking simulators, and finding joy in details. Alice lives, swims, and cycles in Scotland.

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