Introduction[]

The Horde Bash update launches with a new game mode, weapons, heroes, defenders and more on Thursday, Oct 5.

Challenge The Horde, the new mode introduced in the Horde Bash update, introduces a new type of mission which utilizes a unique skill tree and progressive fort system. Your building skills will be tested as you and your squad level up your forts and pit them against a mix of all kinds of monsters.

Get ready to lock and load. Get your hands on the new Scavenger weapon set, four new Scavenger heroes, and two new defenders, all unlockable by completing Challenge the Horde missions and quests.

View the full release notes below. Share your thoughts and suggestions on the Official Forums and Discord.

EA 1.7 Release Notes[]

HORDE BASH - SAVE THE WORLD

Challenge the Horde
- Construct Your Fort
  - Enter the Staging Area and build your Portable Horde Fort.
    - Use your custom fort in all Challenge the Horde adventures.
    - Your fort carries over to each new mission!
  - Gather wood, stone, metal and traps for your base from the new Horde mode skill tree.
- Bring It Into Battle!
  - When your squad is prepared, proceed to the combat zone and face off against hordes of husks!
  - Each zone includes 3-5 challenges, each with increased difficulty.
  - The final hex hosts especially tough challenges for veteran players.
  - Each challenge pits you and your squad up against 10 waves of enemies.
  - Gameplay modifiers are introduced as the waves progress, increasing the difficulty of your foes in a variety of dastardly ways.
    - Certain waves throw a large number of a certain enemy type at you. How many Lobbers, Sploders, or Smashers can your fort handle?
- Earn skill points to unlock additional resources.
  - Harvesting is disabled in Challenge the Horde zones.
  - Resources are granted at the start of combat, and at the end of each successfully completed combat wave
    - Use these resources to craft weapons, place traps, and expand or repair your fortifications.
  - Nodes in the Horde skill tree increase the amount of wood, stone, metal, trap crafting ingredients, weapon crafting ingredients, and ammo dropped each wave.
- Every member of the team can bring one Defender, and will start the Challenge with a few free Defender posts.
Scavenger Tickets
- Players can receive Scavenger Tickets and Horde Skill Points upon successfully completing Horde Challenges.
  - Up to six times every 24 hours.
- Quests grant additional Scavenger Tickets the first time you complete all of the Challenges in each zone.
Event Quests / Rewards
- The new Scavenger Llama in the store holds four new Heroes, and nine new Weapons.
  - Earn the Scavenger currency by completing quests and playing in Horde Bash events.
- 25+ Quests that allow you to progress through the Challenge the Horde event. These quests include rewards that range from Scavenger Tickets to Legendary Items!
  - Complete the third Challenge in the 15 power Horde zone to earn a choice of Epic Melee or Ranged Scavenger Weapon Schematic.
  - If you and your squad manage to complete the 5th tier in a 70 power zone, you will be rewarded with a Legendary Scavenger Hero of your choice.
- 20+ Scavenger Quests with rewards that range from Scavenger tickets to a few high-value items!
  - Complete the “Mission Alert!” Quests to earn one Epic Scavenger Hero.
  - Need a Legendary Defender? Complete the quest “Die, Husks, Die! - Stage 8” to earn one!
New Repeatable Event Quests
- Perpetual Storms will award a choice of upgrade ingredients.

Introducing four new Scavenger Heroes with several new, never-before-seen perks.
- Raider Soldier - Close-range combatant with Shockwave and shotgun perks.
- Gunblazer Outlander - Pistol-packing Outlander adept at scrounging up ammo.
- Machinist Constructor - Uses the B.A.S.E. to supercharge traps.
- Energy Thief Ninja - Generates energy by striking foes in melee combat.
Limited-time “Mission Alert!” quests reward one Epic Scavenger hero of each class
- Earned by completing mission alerts (in Horde or the normal theaters) while using a hero of the specified class.
All of these new heroes are also available in the Scavenger Llama pack.

Nine new weapons introduced with the Scavenger Weapon set. These weapons are much cheaper to craft than usual, but have somewhat reduced durability.

Two new Defenders to help protect your fort! Recruit them and get them on the front line, Commander!
Each defender can be earned by completing event quests, and found in all the usual Llama packs, (upgrade llama, people llama, etc) even after the event ends.

Battle Royale[]

Players can now grab pickups through open windows and other openings.
Fixed an issue where textures would pop in and out from certain distances.
Revival progress is now shown in the UI for the entire team.
- A large progress indicator now displays while being revived.
The death log will now show teammates color correctly.
Tweaks to slotted inventory item look.
The continue / back buttons on the death and win screens will now say “Return to Lobby.”

Save the World[]

MAJOR KNOWN ISSUES

There is a chance that a player can spawn into a zone with no pickaxe.
Husks sometimes spawn in unreachable locations during Encampment encounters.
Purchasing the Weapon Transformation node does not unlock Transforming in the Armory.
Global chat shows a “Joining general chat” message to players who have communications blocked.

GAMEPLAY

The Scavenger Choice Llama is now available in the Loot tab for a limited time.
- The Scavenger Choice Llama guarantees a choice reward for new Scavenger Weapons and Heroes.
- The cost to purchase a Scavenger Choice Llama is 1000 Scavenger Tickets.
  - Scavenger Tickets can be earned by completing limited time Event Quests or Challenge the Horde content.
- Added new Scavenger Items to Collection Book
Scavenger Weapon Set is now available
- Scavenger Launcher will launch a unique trash ball as it’s projectile
Updated Daily Quest Objective counts for the following:
- Daily Destroy (TVs) - increase required number to 20
- Daily Destroy (Propane Tanks) - increase required number to 10
Slow Field Adjustments
- Reduced range to start at 384 from 512.
- Range Upgrade 1 and 2 add 64 from 256.
- Slow starts at 40% and is upgraded to 60%.
- Cooldown reduced from 300 to 180 seconds.
- Husks will now consistently take damage in the trap’s range.
Triple Tap sniper rifle now uses medium bullets (instead from heavy bullets)
Slightly boosted the jump height bonus of the Praying Mantis perk.
Updated all Canny Valley and Twine Peaks Quests that had a singular objective of "Complete 'X' missions"
- Now requires players to complete any of a choice of 3 missions.
  - For example: Old Objective: Complete 3 missions in a 40+ zone New Objective: Complete 3 Retrieve the Data, Fight Category 3 Storm, or Ride The Lightning missions in a 40+ zone.
  - Players can choose any of these missions and must complete a total of 3 missions to fulfill the Quest.
Added a unique new animation for the Hydraulic Hammer’s secondary attack

HEROES

New Outlander: Gunblazer Southie
- Set Phasers to Kill: Increases pistol damage after Phase Shift ends.
- Extended Magazine: Increases pistol ammo capacity.
- Static Cling: Shock Tower afflicts targets, dealing periodic damage
- Llocked and Lloaded [Perk and Tactical]: Llama Fragment drops ammo.
- Bullet Bonanza [Support]: Chance to find double ammo when looting containers.
New Soldier: Raider Headhunter
- Shell Shock: Increased shotgun damage
- Critical Blast: Increased shotgun critical damage
- I Love to Reload: Movement speed boost for a time after reload
- Adjustable Choke [Support]: Increased shotgun critical chance
New Ninja: Energy Thief Mari
- Vigorous Blade: Gains energy every 4 sword strikes
- Rebound: Crescent Kick grants energy per enemy struck
- Vigorous Strikes [Tactical]: Gains energy every 4 melee strikes
New Constructor: Machinist Harper
- Supercharged Traps: BASE increases trap damage
- Overclocked Traps: BASE increases trap reload speed
- Tough Traps [Perk and Support]: All traps crafted by party are more durable
All missing hats for heroes (rarity) rare and above have been added, as well as all missing backpacks for Epic rarity and above.
Created new male Sniper Defender, and female Shotgun Defender.
Fixed an issue that was causing the Charged Fist ability to not apply the full 200% damage bonus.
Anti-Material charge will now apply the full bonus damage when "Long Arm of the Law" is unlocked.
After using the Air Strike gadget, a weapon will now automatically be equipped.
Corrected the stamina cost for the Grenade Cost perk.
- Using the Frag Grenade ability with the Grenade Cost perk now costs 15 stamina.
Slightly boosted the jump height bonus of the Praying Mantis perk.
- The Praying Mantis perk's jump bonus didn't feel like it made enough of a difference. The perk should feel much better now.
Flashbang tactical perk description clarified.
- Frag Grenades now do increased impact damage. When impact limit is reached, enemies are stunned for 2.5 seconds, instead of being knocked back.

UI

Clients properly return to the mission select screen when a server timeout occurs while connected to the lobby
Improved navigation on the Quest menu when using a controller.
- Occasionally when switching between menus controller input would be delayed, that is now fixed.
Performed many performance fixes in the UI allowing smoother and faster navigation on menu screens.
Prevent possible instability if user clicks LAUNCH button in the lobby too many times.
Corrected the Faster Exit perk tooltip description to more accurately explain its effects.
New background art on Skill Tree pages.

ART/ANIMATION

The Horde mode combat map is using a new animated 3D Volumetric Fog technique
- This tech will add a fog layer to the ground and concave areas of the level without hindering visibility
Baseball bats now have a custom alternate swing animation.
Improved a variety of ranged and melee weapon visual effects.
Performed a quality pass on all elemental ranged and melee weapons to have better fitting visual effects.
Beehive Husk visual effects have had it’s opacity turned down to improve visibility in bee swarms.
Hydraulic Sniper and Shotgun icons are now higher resolution.
Added new FX for the Ricochet and Tank modifiers for Horde Bash event
Deep water and Lakes have new details added in the water.
Water reflections have been improved
Replaced an old tree model with higher quality art in the onboarding level.
Added more visual variety of survivors that can be saved in the world

AUDIO

Hawk and Bull join the conversation with new VO.

ONLINE

Players will no longer default to English global chat rooms when failing to find a room available for their language.
Faster response to server timeouts when connecting to the server lobby.
Improved client and server stability related to outages with various backend services.
Improved dedicated server stability by retrying cloud save operations if they fail.

GENERAL

Viewing a Twitch stream and being awarded a viewer quest, and then not logging in for a month could prevent players from logging in.
- This issue is now fixed.
Added ability for console users that are not actively playing game to accept invites from other players.
- Now when selecting the Fullscreen option, the setting should apply correctly.
V-Bucks earned from playing Fortnite are now spendable on all platforms.
- Purchased V-Bucks continue to be only available on the platform purchased.
Fixed several client and server crash conditions.
Fixed a few localization issues.

PC/MAC ONLY

The "Backspace" key can now be bound in player input on PC.
Changed minimum macOS requirement for Fortnite to 10.12.6.
- This should help prevent some crashes that players were experiencing.

XBOX ONLY
Fixed an issue where Xbox emoji's were breaking chat rooms