Fortnite’s new Treasure Hunters season is such a massive success that the battle royale’s player counts are five times higher than last week, because everybody and their mothers want in on the search for Tim Sweeney’s golden ticket. It grants everything in the item shop for free, both for two weeks this year and two more weeks in 2027. That means two things: Most of the people playing Fortnite right now haven’t been playing recently, and folks aren’t necessarily playing to win.
The way the hunt works is that every time you or one of your teammates opens a treasure chest, there’s a chance that a rare prize will be granted to the whole party. It could be a golden A$AP Rocky skin, a Mercedes G-Wagon skin, or the extremely elusive Pirate Shop Access token, which makes virtually the whole shop free. The hunt for that Pirate Shop token in particular has changed the way people play BR. The primary goal for many players is now not to win, but to open as many chests as possible in pursuit of the token.
Since your whole squad gets any of these treasures regardless of who found them, four-player Squad fills have been the place to go for the hunt–understandably, most of us don’t have enough friends who want to play Fortnite 12 hours a day to keep the squad filled on our own. Playing Squad fills has always been a bit of crapshoot in terms of the quality of your teammates, but the new treasure hunt has folks acting a lot more erratic than usual.
While playing entirely too much Fortnite this week, I’ve identified a few player profiles–let’s call them recurring characters–that I’ve been encountering over and over again. While your teammates each game are randomly assigned, they typically follow one of a handful of archetypes during the hunt. I’ve played about 100 games of Squad fills since the new Treasure Hunters mini-season began on Sunday, and nearly all of my teammates ended up being one of these types of players.
