A volcano within 'Fortnite' has started erupting ahead of the game's next season - here's what's going on
- A volcano was added to the main island in "Fortnite," and smoke recently began emanating from it.
- This week, it began erupting - signaling big changes coming to the island as the game enters its ninth season.
- Players are discovering that throwing items into the volcano is filling a meter that leads to ... something. But what could it be?
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"Fortnite" is currently dealing with a natural disaster: a massive volcano is flooding the island with lava!
If it sounds like a problem, that's because it is - the lava is flowing into a series of excavation sites near the volcano, and as you might imagine, falling into lava is a great way to instantly lose a match.
It sounds like the volcano's eruption was the result of a massive player-driven effort to slowly fill meters on four alien runes across the game's main map.
The idea was simple: As players inflicted damage on the runes, the damage accumulated across all players and eventually moved them. In so many words, it took the collective actions of tens of millions of players to fill a series of meters that eventually resulted in the volcano erupting.
After the fourth rune was completed, the volcano started spewing lava - and now here we are:
It's quite a situation.
The volcano's eruption comes with a fifth rune that can only be filled through sacrifice - as players drop items into the volcano, its meter fills.
What happens when that fifth rune fills remains to be seen, but we're just days away from the ninth season in "Fortnite." That's particularly notable here because "Fortnite" maker Epic Games has a history of fundamentally altering "Fortnite" as the game's seasons change.