A Guide to Budget/Free Progression: Managing Survivors/Weapons/Other Cards.

PSA/Guide

Hi! I’m MagicHamsta, a PL82 completely F2P player & chronic runner of SSDs. Some of you may recognize me from the mass mini-llama openings or from other games. I thought I’d make an attempt at making a guide explaining how to progress efficiently for all the new players trying out the Save the World mode of the game as well as older players hitting the proverbial "wall" (more of a very steep slope). I actually started writing this a long time ago but got too busy/less motivated after seeing how long my planned outline was & the direction Fortnite is headed. However, after seeing numerous complaints, misinformation, and general confusion regarding progression along with u/aFrequ's post making a good template, I figure I'd do it to help the little guys. Let’s get started!

TL;DR: Use a High Rarity High Level Soldier OR Ninja (Ninjas are ~~for the rich~~ quite viable), rush Research Boosters, focus mainly on Offense/Tech, Focus evolutions for High Rarity (preference towards Legendary, Epic is fine too) Follower Survivors, always run SSDs, Constant OVERFLOW, Transform all the things (Uncommon to common & Rare Weapons) to Rare Survivors, focus on only 1-3 good weapons + traps (resists the urge to experiment too much; follow the meta), finish main quest line as soon as possible, & spend free time Searching for Survivors/Building Radars.

##Format/Overview

The guide will be formatted similarly to u/aFrequ 's guide on Menus, Missions, and Managing Survivors/Weapons/Other Cards & assumes the reader is knowledgeable about the contents of said guide.

I will go over the following:

Basis of Progression, the requirements.
How to (efficiently) progress.
Transformations, how do they work & why should you care?

Following these, I will include with a short FAQ covering any questions readers post because I likely missed a lot of stuff as I'm writing this on my off time between missions.

#What exactly can I expect to find in this post? Is it just explaining what you can do in game?

Yes, but as far as I'm aware there isn't a simple guide to help players avoid common pitfalls & mistakes which end up hurting them down the line (like not Transforming trash early). Furthermore Free/Budget players have a noticeably different experience & progression path than paying players (Training Manual/Survivor XP vs Raindrop/Evo mat gates). In addition to that I will include other info which I think are valuable & helpful even for experienced players.

So lets get started:

######1) Basis of Progression.

There are a few ways to determine progression: Main quest progression, Power Level, Offense/Tech stat, etc. However all of these are related & roughly interchangeable, a player will have great difficulty progressing through the the main quest line in a timely manner without having a certain Power Level because their damage output would be too low. (theoretically a lowbie could trap the heck out of everything & rely on party Tech to get through but that would be very time & mat inefficient) Likewise a player with high Offense/Tech will tend to have a high PL as Survivors are a large source of Offense/Tech .

Common Mistake : Not rushing Research Boosters in Skill Trees. There's no reason you shouldn't rush it, it'll take a few months for you to unlock all the nodes in the Research Trees, might as well save yourself time & unlock the boosters as soon as possible.

So in a nutshell the requirements for progression are:

Completion of Main Questline (Specifically, main quest SSDs which open new zones)
(Legendary) Survivors
Survivor XP
Evolution Materials (Training Manuals, Rain drops, Bottled lightning, etc),

2) How to (efficiently) Progress.

So how do you progress efficiently? In short, be efficient: minimize waste & maximize gains.

Lets go over all the things required for progression that I've mentioned above.

Main Questline: You must do the missions, no way around it as far as I can tell. However there are ways to save time:

Run Soldier OR Ninja, I used to be an Outlander main till Canny, had a few Constructor main friends who I would supply with tons of mats but then my inferior damage output was causing missions to take far too long so I swapped over to Soldier. Ninja are probably viable after the Ninja viability patch but do note it's easier to simply stack Offense to a high degree rather than attempt both Offense & Tech, especially as a F2P/Budget player with limited high rarity Survivors.
Try to get groups going via global chat/friends list for the more annoying/bottleneck missions. Chances are if you're stuck on something, someone else is also stuck on it.
Learn how to funnel & kill box properly. They save time & materials when used properly. I personally only kept 1 trap at a decent level (A legendary gas trap), everything else, I traded for since I was surrounded by whales with far more fancier stuff due to my progression speed. However I realized you don't need a ton of fancy stuff or giant fortresses, just a proper funnel & a few effective traps (Retractable floor spikes, Wooden Floor Spikes, Gas Trap, Wall/Floor Launchers) will get you through most missions. Faster you churn through missions, the faster you will progress. The higher level zones also reward far more per mission than lower level zones & takes about the same amount of time so you'll want to leave the lower zones as soon as possible. (Maximize Gains).

Common mistakes:

A) Focusing too much on Commander/Power Level. Numerous players complain about Stonewood/Plank not giving XP, this is a good thing.. It means you've done enough missions where they stopped rewarding Commander XP. Instead focus on your Offense/Tech stats. As a budget player you should have zones turn gray sooner (zone-wise) than whales. This is because you'll have to spend more time grinding out missions (especially SSDs) while whales can focus solely on main quest line/rain farming).

B) Experimenting too much: Choose 1-3 good weapons, traps, & Heroes and stick with them. For a long time my primary weapon was an Energy Raptor (it was literally painful as it's a semi but it got the job done, if I could redo I'd attempt to get a set of Elemental weapons), Hydra was a godsend. If you want to experiment, keep them at copper & test them out in Stonewood. Attempting to experiment too much will just waste precious evo mats & XP which is a problem even whales face. Due to evolution materials being a common bottleneck, experimenting too much is a bad thing as experimentation requires evolution mats.

Survivor XP : When main quest line missions aren't available, actively search for missions that reward Survivor XP & Evo mats (Preferably Survivor XP + Rain/Bottled Lightning. But Survivor XP alone also works as it's a 3x multiplier if it's alone). Put priority on Search for Survivor and Radar missions as those are very easy & allows you to farm mats for your SSD without pissing anyone off. (Search for Survivors also rewards People which is important for Transformations.)

Common Mistake : Farming Hero XP missions. Farming Hero XP rewards is one of the dumbest thing you can do in game. As a F2P/budget player you will be rolling in literally millions of unusable Hero XP from the sheer amount of SSDs you'll run (see Transformations section below). Hero XP also cannot be spent past a certain point (lvl 10) without wasting Evo mats. Avoid Hero XP missions like the plague unless they're a bottleneck quest or have really good evo mats & event rewards.

Evolution Mats: Events & Storm missions are actually very good for farming evolution mats. However the lower you are, the less you will get from them. This is why it's important to progress the main quest line as fast as possible between events so you can take full advantage of the events. (For example the 14 day StS 70 reward & HB 76 stuff.)
Survivors : ~~Goat~~ Llama sacrifices to RNGesus. No way around this. Most of my early leveling was spent with only 0-3 legendary survivors. (This Halloween event literally boosted my PL by 8 just because I managed to get more Legendary Survivors to dump my mats & XP into.) As a F2P/Budget player, you can grind out daily vbuck missions to prepare for Troll/Super llamas (I suggest rerolling any daily that isn't "Do missions in Twine/Canny/Plank", because those missions give more than the standard 50.) BUT you can be intelligent about which llamas you offer your ~~blood~~ vbuck sacrifices to. Focus on Troll/Super llamas DURING EVENTS opening money Llamas during events also gives you the corresponding event currency. Personally I don't care much for Super Weapon or Super Hero Llamas as I'm content with my event Hydra (literally all my other weapons suck) & my Special Forces I pulled out of a Legendary Transformation Key but I do need more Legendary Survivors to fill out my Survivor slots.

Common Mistakes : Evolving Rare & below Survivors to a high degree. You can level up Epic & below survivors as you'll get most of the Survivor XP back, however Evolving followers below Legendary means you'll never get the evo mats back when you replace them. This isn't as bad as it used to be due to the Transformation rework making it easier to gain Training Manuals & Events/Storms making it easier to farm Evo mats, however it's still advised to focus your materials and XP into Legendary/Epic (but with a focus on Legendary) survivors to reduce waste.

You might be wondering what you're going to do about stats if you aren't allowed to evolve inferior Survivors. The trick is to run High Rarity, High Level heroes: Fortitude & Resistance are largely useless stats that can be replaced by simply running High Rarity, High Level Heroes as those have enough innate HP & Shield to render Fortitude/Resistance largely meaningless. (Ridiculous, I know but unless those are reworked, it's how it is.) However Offense & Tech cannot be replaced by simply running High rarity, High Level Heroes & are essential to your damage output.

Why do I recommend not wasting mats on lower Rarity survivors?

Here's some #'s:

Materials required to max out one Legendary Survivor:

Training Manuals: 3 + 8 + 13 + 18 = 42.

Pure Rain: 10 + 20 + 30 + 40 = 100.

Bottled Lightning: 8 + 16 + 24 = 48.

Eye of Storm: 8 + 16 = 24.

Storm Shard: 8.

Metric boatload of Survivor XP.

There are 14 Offense and 14 Tech Follower Survivor slots. This means if you want to fill all Offense & Tech slots with Legendary Survivors, it will require:

1,176 Training Manuals

2,800 Pure Rain

1,344 Bottled Lightning

672 Eye of Storm

224 Storm Shard

Multiple Metric boatloads of Survivor XP

Legendary followers alone require massive amounts of material & unless you get extremely unlucky they will also provide a large enough sink & sufficient power as long as you gather enough of them to focus them in Offense/Tech, & any Evo mat used up on lower rarity survivors will be gone forever when recycled (to make room for legendary survivors).

I did not mention Training Manuals as I will cover that in the Transformation section below:

######3) Transformations, how do they work & why should you care?

How it works: Basically you unlock the permanent Rare Survivor Transformation & throw Transformation fodder till you reach 30 Transformation points, at which point it will spit out a Rare Survivor for you to recycle and acquire a Training Manual + a bit of Survivor XP. Due to the Transformation rework patch it's no longer as difficult to acquire Training Manuals but you will still need a good amount of them (see below).

The goal is to turn all your junk (Grey/Greens/Rare Weapons/sometimes Rare Traps) into Training Manuals (Rare/Epic Survivors) as you can be perfectly fine maxing your weapon/traps with a few dozen Weapon/Trap designs but will require hundreds of Training Manuals to max your Survivors.

Now with Artistically Rendered Flowchart. IF ALREADY RARE SURVIVOR, RECYCLE DIRECTLY, NO NEED TO ATTEMPT TO TRANSFORM A RARE SURVIVOR INTO A RARE SURVIVOR.

Why you should care: You'll need 1,176 Training Manuals to max Evo a full set of legendary survivors for all your Offense & Tech slots & each Rare Survivor, Defender, or Hero only grants 1 Training Manual each (Epics grant 4 each). However unlike regular Evo mats, you cannot farm them directly from missions/alerts/events. Other than a few one time rewards, you must recycle Rare or higher Survivors, Defenders, and Heroes to acquire Training Manuals.

This is where Transformations come into play: You can use the Permanent Rare Survivor Transformation key to turn useless cards into Rare Survivors & recycle those to get Training Manuals.

So how do you get fodder to power the Transformations? SSDs. SSDs reward Trash Llamas which are great for providing a lot of useless schematics which you can use as transformation fodder.

As for People? They are obtained by saving Survivors in missions, Search for Survivor missions reward a lot of people (80+ per mission at Twine) & are very easy to do.

Common Mistakes :

A) Not taking advantage of the infinite bag of holding (OVERFLOW). As a F2P/budget player, it will be weeks, if not months, before you get something decent to use. However you will receive a ton of trash from all the Trash llamas you're farming. Rather than recycle the trash directly, save them in the Overflow until you can farm enough People to convert them into actually useful Training Manuals. Even better, keep them in Trash Llama form, I currently 460 mini-llama in my loot tab as I still have Halloween llamas I'm farming & would rather have access to them directly (especially if they drop more legendary survivors). You should drain your Overflow in anticipation of events as events tend to give good things & opening new stuff will put them at the end of the Overflow.

B) Using up too many useless Transformation Keys: You don't need to use up every Legendary Transformation Key, I hardly touch mine., if you don't even play Outlander, what's the point of using a Legendary Outlander Key? Same for Melee weapons or even Legendary Hero Transformation keys. Besides as a F2P/Budget player you'll likely be lacking in enough Epic Heroes to make use of them.

So you may be wondering why I seem to be playing in such an awkward manner? Because my mission clear times weren't affected and it reduces my grind in the long run (Since I already have several Offense slots filled with 5* Legendary Survivors, means I don't need to replace highly evolved Epic Survivors which would set me back). Why avoid inflating my PL? Because PL means nothing, Offense & Tech are king. Why throw all my Rare schematics into the great Transformation fire? Because more Training Manuals for the Offense/Tech Throne. This allowed me to play significantly above my PL (due to my high Offense), continually progress all the way to late Twine + PL81 without hitting any major bumps while I've seen others in Plank/Canny hit almost a full stop as they ran out of Training Manuals and realized they were recycling all their Transformation fodder.

Feel free to ask question as I'm sure I missed a few things (wrote this between missions while trapped under a doggo.)

Q&A:

u/spacefrog_feds and u/Aegis_Auras asked "Would you recommend not worrying about these [Bonus/Matching] stats? are there any particular stats that are worth trying to match up?"

A: The matching bonuses won't make or break your character. I recommend a focus on raw Offense/Tech. If you must go for matching bonuses, use your "dead" slots (Fortitude/Resistance).

u/Paintchipper asked "What would you suggest for those shmucks who are far enough into the game that they don't catch the random person experimenting with it, but are stuck soloing unpopular missions, or for those who are trying to progress while an event is going on (either from lack of interest or completing the event)?

A: Friend everyone near or below your PL, they are most likely to run into the same or similar bottleneck quest. Make a sort of quest co-op, help them with their bottleneck, they help you with yours. I've done similar things for higher SSDs which fewer people wants to run. Heck, run the quests yourself so you can find more players around your PL to friend, then you guys can run the bottleneck quests after the quests (or if you guys are daily capped)

u/Warpspeed90 asked whether we should always roll legendary survivors in our slots & as a Constructor main whether he should switch to Soldier for more Offense Power.

A: In almost all cases legendary survivors give too many stats to not slot. (The only reasonable exception I can think of to not to slot legendary survivors is if your slots are already full of better matching legendaries.) I supposed if you had mismatching legendaries to a mismatched mythic lead (causes a penalty for mythic mismatch) compared to a full set of epics with matching mythic AND matching (useful) bonuses, Epics may be comparable.

But IIRC u/aFrequ figured that maxed Legendaries actually overcame the mismatch penalty. (May be wrong on this. But my rough estimations reached similar conclusions....also I'm still aiming for the full legendary set in preparation for future content & can't bear to waste mats max evolving an Epic to test.)

As for Hero, if you really enjoy using Constructor by all means keep at it. At the end of the day, Fortnite is a game & you should play to have fun (I just happen to have fun with fast & efficient progression). However do be aware that constructors are schematic heavy (needs good traps along with good weapon(s) to be a decent constructor) compared to Soldier/Ninja and will be less efficient in clear times unless you build the boring standard bases. Also note the issues Constructors have had in the previous event (Horde Bash), where the higher levels of play determined it was better to go without them.

u/GavelGaffle had some confusion regarding the Overflow bag concept & requested clarification. (May move this into a section of its own if there is significant confusion from other players)

A: Basically your Armory has an inventory limit. When players have too many schematics, survivors, defenders, heroes, or not enough people things go into the overflow bag (things in overflow are grey with a lock icon). When this happens, some people get tempted to recycle transformation fodder. Instead they should take advantage of the Overflow bag & treat it as extended storage until they can farm the People to transform their fodder.

u/Pendulin and u/Greys88 wanted to know how I run so many SSDs/acquire so many trash llamas.

A: I always keep General chat visible. If I see someone asking for help & I only have a few minutes left in my mission, I tell them I'll be available in X minutes & see if I can snag the spot. I also spam Quick Join in lower zones & hop around till I find SSDs (really wish they had dedicated SSD matchmaking). And I also friend people I help SSDs with so they can call on me if they want SSD help.

u/Micss wanted to know how to drain the Overflow efficiently; whether he should aggressively retire/recycle rare and even epic stuff?

Made an epic Flowchart to help out. You should be aggressively recycling and Transforming till the Overflow drains. I end up running a few Twine Search for Survivors to build up People then go on a Transformation/Recycling/Collection Booking binge.

Posted Nov 3, 2017, 2:16 AM UTC · edited

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