Credit: Epic Games

It’s that time again: Fortnite’s Season 5 is coming to a close, and we’ve only got a few moments left to unlock all of its secrets. But as Season 6 approaches, you might be a little bit confused about what’s actually going on. Fortnite added two huge new platforms last season: Nintendo Switch and Android. That means there are a ton of new players that might not be in the loop on how all that stuff works, and if you’re one of those, don’t worry. There’s a ton of stuff going on in Fortnite, but the seasons serve as the game’s primary organizing principle. So if you’re feeling lost, here’s everything you need to know about Fortnite: Battle Royale Season 6.

A new battle pass: This is what a Fortnite season is, on a fundamental level. Every ~10 weeks, Epic Games drops a new battle pass. The battle pass is an approximately $10 purchase that comes stacked with a wealth of skins, gliders, pickaxes and other cosmetics. You don’t get them all at once, however: you have to level the pass up by playing and completing challenges, and only by reaching the lofty heights of tier 100 do you get its most valuable rewards. It also comes with unique challenges that you can’t see unless you’ve bought the pass. This is Fortnite’s central monetization strategy, blending paid microtransactions with a traditional grind.

You can always just pay extra to level it up, of course. Epic CEO Tim Sweeney has to eat.

When does it start: Originally thought to be starting earlier this week, Season 6 is confirmed to begin on Thursday, September 27.

The theme: Each season has a theme that informs the skins in the battle pass as well as all of the other attendant changes and plot points. We’re only now starting to receive teasers about the theme, but as always things are a moving target. What we know so far is that a strange interdimensional purple cube has melted into Loot Lake, turning the whole thing purple and bouncy. A slightly less opaque hint came in the form of Yesterday’s teaser: a guy with a llama mask–or a guy with a llama head–superimposed over the cube with the text “every party needs a DJ.” So we know one skin, at least, and a hint of some sort of party theme.

Take caution, however: it can be pretty hard to tell what the theme of a Fortnite season is. Season 4 was probably the most straightforward with its superhero focus, but even that had a weird and complicated movie theme running alongside it. Season 5 was totally inscrutable, and could best be described as something like “inter-dimensional summer fun and also a desert.” I hope that Season 6 is a little more straightforward, but we’ll know for sure on Thursday morning.

Map Changes: Every season has come along with major new map changes, and this one is likely to no different. Just what they’ll be, however, is sort of a mystery: many have guessed that Loot Lake will become something like “Lava Lake,” or that the powers of the purple cube will swap the whole map over to an “evil” version. As with the theme, however, it’s tough to guess. Last season people accurately predicted the creation of a desert biome and a Viking area, but the golf course really came out of left field. This one is even harder to predict, but we can say with some certainty that the map is going the change in big ways.

There’s only one map in Fortnite: Battle Royale, and so you’ll see the map changes whether you pay for the battle pass or not.

New items, modes, and whatever else: A season is a big thing in Fortnite, and Epic usually uses new ones as a punctuation mark to push them forwards. Past seasons have introduced gravity-defying “hop-rocks” and instant teleporting Rifts, so we assume that we’ll see something similar to that this time around. We’ll also likely get a new item category of some kind, whether that’s removable helmets, customizable map markers, pets, or whatever. Last season we got toys, which were a pretty big addition to the game, particularly in playground mode. We also got limited-time events in the form of the Birthday and High Stakes events, and we assume we’ll see something with Halloween soon. These things aren’t tied to seasons necessarily, but seasons remain the game’s best way of organizing time.

Story? This one is a bit harder to figure. Fortnite: Battle Royale has a story of a kind, it’s just a weird one. It also has characters, they just only exist as player skins. The story of a season is primarily told through loading screens that you unlock by completing challenges, but it also ties into in-game events like the arrival of the cube, or last season’s rocket launch. Every season has only gotten bigger as the game has gone on, so look for all sorts of stuff like that now.

Do I need to care? Nope, not particularly! If you’re just here to waste noobs and grab dubs, everything is still basically the same. Yes, the map will be different and there wil be new items, but the basic contours of the battle royale format go unchanged.

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