The homebase menu in Fortnite is split up into several tabs, each allowing you to control certain things. Since the game does a very poor job at explaining what a lot of it is for, this guide will help you understand what each of the tabs in the homebase menu does.
Play – This is where you go before jumping into a game. It lets you decide on the hero you want and set the gadgets to use. If you want to setup a private party and invite some friends, this is the place to do it.
Map – This is where you can see all available game types that you have available to you. You can browse through them and select a specific mission or you can go to your storm shield base and make some modifications to the base. Quite often you will havea quest that is directly linked to one of these missions. If you view the quest, you will have the ability to trigger the mission from the quest page. Doing this will bring you to the play tab and automatically trigger the mission for you.
Heroes – While you can only use 1 hero at a time in Fortnite, you can have multiple heroes available to use whenever you like. The heroes are broken up into classes and have various other attributes associated with them. The Heroes tab allows you to view the heroes that you have available and you can view all of the related information about each one. It is also possible to level up and evolve your heroes from this tab. The levelling system for heroes is fairly standard, but if you want to know more about it, read the guide on hero leveling in Fortnite.
Squads – The squad tab is the source of a lot of confusion. What do squads do and why should I care? It took me a long time before I figured out what it was for and to be honest its a whole lot of confusion for nothing. Squads are just a way to build the stats of your hero. They do nothing in terms of gameplay. You have multiple different squads, each with a particular focus. For example, the defense squad are focused on defense. This doesn’t relate to anything in game, at least not at the moment. However, it does contribute to your playable heroes defense. If you have a high powered team in the defense squad, it will greatly increase the defense of your main hero while in game. I am sure most people expected the squads to be some sort of mini game where you could control them and assign them to missions etc, but this is not the case. The squads are only used to influence your power level. If you want to know more, check out the guide explaining power levels in Fortnite.
There is another area to the squads tab that allows you to send your idle heroes off to do jobs that gather resources. For most of the missions that I have seen, the resources include wood and other basic things, but I am sure this will eventually lead to some rare stuff later on in the game. There are various vehicles that you can unlock to send the hero to do the mission with. The type of vehicle will determine the portion of loot. The dirtbike loot will not be as good as the loot from the helicopter. Each mission will take a predefined amount of time to complete and depending on the current hero you have highlighted, will have a % chance of completion. The higher level your hero is the higher the percentage of completion will be. If your hero fails the mission, you get no reward.
Armory – Armory is probably a bad word to describe what this tab is as it isn’t just used to manage weapons. You can actually manage all assets in your entire Homefort from here. All of your weapon schemas, trap blueprints, heroes, resources, and survivors are stored here. From each section you can go in and view what you have gathered so far for each of the sections. On top of being able to manage your assets, there are some utilities here that help you enhance your overall Homefort.
There are 2 features found in the Armory that are used to keep your base managed better. You have a fixed amount of space in your homefort to store all of the items found in the armory. When this fills up, you need to start deleting things. Instead of throwing them away, you can send them over to the collection book. Once in this book they can no longer be used, but most of the time you will want to dump your low level items over here when you find better stuff. There are some huge rewards for gaining levels in the collection book. It might feel like a sacrifice at times when you put items in here, but the rewards you get for gaining a level far outweigh the drawback to it.
The other feature from the armory is the transform ability. This takes a while to obtain as it is one of the later items in the first skill tree. Once unlocked it lets you transform multiple survivors and turn them into a random higher level character. This is only worth using once you have an abundance of unused survivors. Early on in the game, you will be need every survivor you can find to fill the spaces in your homebase. Once you have a lot of spare cards, you can start considering which ones you want to transform. I would always focus on the collection book first and if you have multiple cards that you no longer want and already have in the collection book, you can transform them. This helps you keep your numbers down and gives you a way to turn some low quality cards into higher quality cards.
Skills – For those who are familiar with RPG style games, this is essentially a talent tree, but it is possible to unlock everything on the tree. For every level you gain, you will earn a skill point. You can use these skill points to purchase skills from the skill tree. Some of the skills will give you bonuses to your F.O.R.T, unlock squad slots & abilities and others will give you new in game bonuses and abilities. I have written a dedicated guide for the skill trees in Fortnite that goes into more detail on this.
Loot – This is where Llamas live. Visits to this tab are usually fun since you get to whack a llama with a random weapon and get a bunch of nice rewards from inside of it. There are several things you can do to unlock llamas through your activities in game. Whenever you unlock one, it will be available from this tab and you can whack it to get a prize. It is also possible to purchase the llamas using vBucks. You earn vBucks from doing missions and completing quests, but it is also possible to pay real money in the store tab to get more vBucks. When you purchase a llama with vBucks you get to break it open to get the items inside. Any items you get from a llama will be added to your inventory automatically.
Store – This is a shortcut to the digital store for the game. This allows you to spend real money to purchase in-game content.
Quests – This tab allows you to see all of the available quests that you have at the moment. There is an expandable menu that allows you to see all of the different quest types you have available. All quests are technically active at once, so there is never a need to choose which quest you want to attempt. If you are in a mission for a specific quest and you happen to meet the requirements for another quest, the quest will be complete. This allows you to complete several quests in a single game.