Here’s an extended look at how to survive Fortnite’s enemy waves ahead of its July 25 release

By James O'Connor

Fortnite is a complex game, and if you want to be good by the time it launches you’ll want to start studying now.

This video from Arekkz gets into the key details about the Fortnite experience, and digs into the numerous skill trees and abilities at your disposal. Here are some of the highlights:

• Gathering is “the foundation” of your experience. Make sure you spend plenty of time gathering resources.
• There are three main categories of resource: wood, brick, metal. You can get others, like nuts and bolts, but these are the main ones.
• Your pickaxe can destroy ‘pretty much anything’ on the map.
• It’s a good idea to be focused on what resources you need, and thus to figure out which objects will give up which resources.
• The second ability on your skill tier, ‘weak point vision’, will half your mining time by letting you know which points to hit on items to gather resources faster.
• Make sure you ‘search’ objects that can be searched before you destroy them, or you’ll lose the resources inside them.
• There are missions around the map and hidden treasure, so it’s important to explore.
• You can find blueprints that ask you to build specific structures or buildings. These are good for teaching you better building techniques.
• Whenever you obtain a weapon you also get a schematic for it, which you can use to rebuild broken weapons. Weapons will inevitably break after some time.
• Objects can be shared and traded between players, so be communicative in co-op.
• On a most basic level, it’s very important to build walls around your target, even if they are just wooden walls. Anything is better than nothing.
• Having said that, a building without traps isn’t much good to you.
• Characters can be leveled up to unlock new abilities. There are heaps here, but you need rare resources to unlock all of them.
• ‘Pretty much everything’ can be leveled up in Fortnite, from characters to weapons to traps.

Check out the full video above for a full breakdown.

Fortnite will be available in early access from July 25. There are several different versions to choose between if you want to jump in early, although the final release, in 2018, will be free-to-play.