7 Things Minecraft Can Learn from LEGO Fortnite

Minecraft has become a big part of so many people’s lives, keeping them engrossed in their blocky world for hours. It’s been around for over a decade now, and we certainly hope it’s not going away any time soon. Despite that, it’s not a perfect game. Recently released survival game LEGO Fortnite has been all the rage and for various good reasons. It offers plenty of opportunities you don’t have in Minecraft. So, we decided to compare the two games and see what are some features LEGO Fortnite has that Minecraft does not.

1. Clearer Gameplay

This is possibly the most important difference between LEGO Fortnite and Minecraft. The reason why many people give up on something is because they cannot understand it. This is what happens with lots of Minecraft beginners, including my editor who ran around aimlessly in the game until I helped him out. Sorry for calling you out (😅) like that.

But it’s true. Minecraft just spawns you in the middle of a random location and your job is to survive, thrive, automate, fight, gather resources, build, and everything else. But what exactly shows the players all these possibilities? Well, pretty much only tutorials and guides.

There is no in-game tutorial, no quest system, or anything that will hold your hand and guide you through the game mechanics. Some players might prefer this, as you’re allowed to do whatever you want whenever you want to. But it can make players, especially beginners, pretty lost and therefore uninterested.

LEGO Fortnite solves this problem with NPC villagers. The starting villager shows you the basics. How to make a campfire, gather food, build a shack and a bed, you get to learn all that from the get-go. From then, you become familiar with the crafting benches, items, creatures, and biomes.

Thanks to quests, players know what to chase and how to improve, and they simply stay immersed for a long time.

What Minecraft needs is to take inspiration from some amazing modpacks out there, such as Vault Hunters. It includes an informative and straightforward quest system that also rewards the player for completing each task. This motivates the players to finish the quests, which will eventually lead them to the advanced and exciting game mechanics they will enjoy.

2. Useful Companions

As soon as you start playing LEGO Fortnite, there is a person ready to welcome you. This villager is only one of the many LEGO Fortnite villagers you can meet and get to know. They essentially behave like players who will gladly do anything you ask them to. For example, by giving a villager an axe, pickaxe, or even a sword, they will use those tools to gather resources or help you fight creatures you find in this world.

In Minecraft, you have access to wolves that can help you in combat, which will be even more useful thanks to the wolf armor that’s being added in Minecraft 1.21. However, they cannot talk to you, nor can you control them very well.

Furthermore, thanks to redstone farms, you can gather the resources you need. But again, they are not living people but just very loud and ugly machines.

If you haven’t played Minecraft, you may think that Minecraft villagers are living people and are fairly useful. However, they just follow their pre-made routine and cannot directly help you out in gameplay-related actions. Minecraft is because of this not very good at providing you with useful company.

But if there were NPCs of sorts throughout your world, you’d feel as if you are not alone and have somebody to talk to even if you’re playing in the single-player mode.

3. Harder Survival Aspects

Even though Minecraft is called a survival game, it’s extraordinarily easy to survive. All you need is to make a bed, get some food, and make some basic tools, weapons, and a shield. All of this can be done on the first day of your world. After that, there are pretty much no other natural or survival elements that can harm you, except your own recklessness and lack of combat skills.

Whereas LEGO Fortnite has special survival meters that determine your temperature, similar to a rather challenging survival game Don’t Starve Together. This value can cause you to become cold or warm, depending on the biome you’re in. And if you don’t take action quickly, you’ll start freezing or burning, which will deplete your health. As you can assume, this mechanic simply keeps you on your toes, but is also quite manageable.

They also make the world more immersive, since you need to keep track of the locations you are visiting and how they can actually harm you. You also ought to prepare for your journeys, so that you can counteract the environmental elements thrown at you.

Minecraft biomes are obviously nothing like this. There are no challenges associated with an area, except for powder snow. There should be more features like that, which will surely make the game more difficult but will also provide a greater sense of achievement.

4. Building Has a Purpose

Building is one of the most important aspects of Minecraft. It’s the reason why most players have been playing the game even after so many years. However, it doesn’t really have a purpose besides looking nice. It doesn’t matter whether you’ll sleep under the stars or have a roof above your head. Well, unlike Minecraft, building does matter in LEGO Fortnite.

In this survival game, as we mentioned, you can get cold or warm. What a close area in the form of a building does is stabilize your temperature, so you’ll be safe. This makes sense and is pretty realistic. Moreover, what’s not realistic in Minecraft is that you can sleep without issues while rain is pouring on you. Come on now, who can sleep in those conditions? LEGO Fortnite villagers certainly cannot.

By placing a bed inside a house and assigning it to a villager, they can sleep even if it’s raining. This is not possible if the bed is in the open and it’s raining. Even though this doesn’t really make a huge difference, it’s cool to see that LEGO Fortnite villagers behave as anyone would in real life.

Now let’s talk more about the building itself in LEGO Fortnite. This game’s building aspect is as big as it is in Minecraft, but it’s also far simpler. You’re given such freedom and are easily able to place large walls or platforms at once. In addition, you’ve got a pretty decent reach, which makes the building process easier and faster. And if you’re not all that creative and just want to have beautiful-looking buildings, you can still achieve this with the help of blueprints.

They allow you to build numerous kinds of prebuilt houses, sheds, bungalows, and other buildings available. By selecting and positioning the building, you can start constructing it. Furthermore, you can also see the resources you’ll need for each of the sections, so you know exactly what to focus on. So, even if you don’t want to think about the building process too much, you still have an ability to create amazing-looking villages.

5. Food Actually Makes a Difference

Are you one of those people who think food in Minecraft should be reworked? If you are, welcome to the team! Most food items in Minecraft just replenish your hunger points, and that’s it. Yeah, there are items that also provide you with certain buffs or debuffs but are admittedly not used frequently. There should be more food items that actually make a difference and offer effects you cannot obtain in any other way.

LEGO Fortnite includes food items that not only refill your hunger and health but also provide you with special effects. For example, the spicy pepper and spicy burger keep you from getting cold and snowberry and snowberry juice help you avoid overheating.

These specific effects are directly linked with survival challenges, which make them practical and worth your while. Furthermore, some food items, such as meat pie and pizza, grant you extra hearts, apart from replenishing health.

This is what Minecraft is lacking. The game should include food items that are necessary for certain reasons, be it to access a specific area or make a task less challenging. This way you will utilize them, therefore, increasing the item’s value.

6. Combat Feels Good

Combat in Minecraft is, truth be told, pretty bland, especially on the Bedrock edition. I know, there are several weapons from both ranged and melee categories, but their attacks have no variations in the game. Furthermore, the fighting itself doesn’t require too much thinking or a strategy. Even though the Minecraft 1.21 Breeze is a completely unique mob that offers a combat experience you’ve never had before, the game needs more diversity in this huge feature.

Now, let’s see how LEGO Fortnite does it. For starters, creatures in LEGO Fortnite have both melee and ranged attacks, which will keep you on your toes and also make them more alive and realistic. This implementation makes the enemies harder to chase as well. Additionally, you can charge up the attack and therefore make it stronger. The slam attack is just one of the features every good fighting game has.

Another one of those features is the dodge move. I mean, why isn’t this in Minecraft? This simple move makes it easier to avoid attacks and also offers more exciting battles. The environment plays a role in combat as well, which is very important.

The final combat mechanic we would like to cover from LEGO Fortnite is that once you engage an enemy, their health bar is displayed above them. This is such a simple but unbelievably useful thing that many players take for granted. Not only that, but every attack displays a damage read-out, so you know exactly how strong you are at any time.

7. Grind is Manageable

The last difference we’d like to point out between Minecraft and LEGO Fortnite is one of the most important game mechanics in survival games – grind. With so many different items you can collect, it’s obvious that some are rarer than others and some are simply used a lot.

Grind in vanilla Minecraft can get extremely repetitive and tiring. The game requires plenty of basic materials for both crafting recipes and creative building.

Unless you make one of those massive, ugly, and loud automatic redstone farms, you have to collect them on your own. LEGO Fortnite solves yet another problem with villagers. These people will help you collect resources if you give them the adequate tools, which will speed up the grind significantly. However, if you don’t want to collect a specific resource over and over again, you can obtain it from villagers passively.

After you find or craft an item, you can ask your LEGO villager friends to do the same. So you can dedicate your time to exploring, fighting, and learning other fun mechanics if you are not into the grind. Though, if you think this mechanic seems way too OP, then don’t worry, as developers have balanced it properly. The villagers have a certain cooldown, so they won’t just give you unlimited items every day.

They pretty much act as players and will accomplish as much as a player can. This feature also gives you a choice. The first one is if you’re in a hurry, you can ask your villager to come with you so you finish the job quickly. The second choice is just to wait for the villagers to get or make the thing for you in case time is not of the essence.

So these are the seven features LEGO Fortnite has that Minecraft doesn’t. Don’t get me wrong, I love Minecraft and have been playing it for more than five years. It’s an amazing game that has created a massive and awesome community, and I’m blessed to be a part of it it. It has also allowed people like me to express their creativity in a very cool way. However, after playing LEGO Fortnite for a week, I have to agree that the game did do a better job when it comes to the features I highlighted above.

But what is your opinion on this? Have you tried out LEGO Fortnite? Do you think we missed some relevant features that should exist in Minecraft? Or perhaps, you think LEGO Fortnite devs are the ones who should do the learning? Share your thoughts in the comments section below!