Should you buy Fortnite’s Save the World mode just to farm V-Bucks?

Fortnite discussion usually revolves around the game's Battle Royale mode, but the original, cooperative Save the World mode is still alive and kicking. Save the World will reportedly go free-to-play sometime this year, but for now you have to pay at least $39.99 to access it.

At least you did until this morning. The mode is on sale for 50 percent off until July 30, which means you only have to pay $19.99 if you want to give it a shot. The question, if you're not interested in a mode that's more grind than adventure, is whether or not you should pick up the mode at its sale price just to farm V-Bucks.

The answer is simple: Maybe.

In this guide we're going to take a look at what kind of V-Bucks you can expect to get from Save the World, and how hard you'll have to work to get them.

Why would you care about grinding V-Bucks in Save the World?

Because the V-bucks you earn in either mode aren't stuck there.

"Any V-Bucks earned/bought in Save the World or Battle Royale can be spent in the other game modes," Epic Games explains on the official FAQ page. So if you earn V-Bucks in Save the World mode, you can then spend them in Battle Royale to pay for skins, gliders or even the Battle Pass itself.

We already know that the Battle Pass earns you more V-Bucks than it costs as long as you're a moderate to heavy player, so Epic is clearly comfortable throwing V-Bucks around as a reward for playing. You just have to ask yourself if the time and money you're sinking into Save the World mode is worth it if you're primarily a Battle Royale player.

Is Save the World fun?

I don't want to re-review the game in a paragraph, but it's a cooperative, PvE version of Fortnite that has a lot of unnecessary collecting and grinding systems that make it a bit too repetitive and basic to be enjoyable in the long term. But it's not horrible. It just feels muddled in general, and I'm not sure if there's a good way to save it in the long term. Epic Games has no plans to bring this mode to the Switch, in case you're curious.

How do we decide if Save the World is worth it for the V-Bucks?

We're going to translate everything into V-Bucks to keep it as simple as possible. Save the World mode is $19.99 right now, which would get you 2,000 V-Bucks in the store if you were to buy two $9.99 bundles.

So you're going to have to earn back 2,000 V-Bucks before you're making any V-Bucks in profit, which is what we're interested in. These skins don't buy themselves.

That's the goal: to get over 2,000 V-Bucks so the mode pays for itself and maybe we make a few V-Bucks for cosmetic purchases. How quickly can you get there? What's the easiest way to grind for V-Bucks?

Let's find out.

Just show up, you'll make V-Bucks

It's easier than you think. Unlike Battle Royale, Save the World gives you a daily reward just for logging in. And some of those days are worth V-Bucks.

Assuming nothing has changed in recent patches, you'll earn 10,000 V-Bucks if you log in every day for 336 days. The first 50 V-Buck reward comes in at day 11, and the values go up from there.

It doesn't matter if you skip a day. Your logins don't have to be consecutive, but the more days you skip the longer it will take to get all the V-Bucks.

So we're already 8,000 V-Bucks in the black, and all we had to do was show up, every day, for under a year. Seems easy enough, especially if you make it part of your daily routine. Wake up, take a shower, get dressed, log into Save the World, go to work or school ... the V-Bucks will pile up.

Play the main storyline

The game will hold your hand through the early tutorials, and you'll soon find yourself tackling missions, side quests and challenges that offer V-Bucks as a reward.

It's simple enough to go to the quests tab in the menu, flip through all the quests you have available to find the ones that offer V-Bucks as a reward and focus on those. Storm Shield Defense quests will always net you at least 100 V-Bucks, and they appear at semi-regular intervals as the side quests come and go with other opportunities for V-Bucks.

So yes, you can earn V-Bucks this way, and you're going to need to play through the story to advance, but it's not going to be your main source of income. But the V-Buck rewards found here can pile up, and we're already way past our goal just by logging in. Think of these as bonus V-Bucks you're going to get just by moving through the storyline.

Daily quests

You will get a daily quest every day that's worth at least 50 V-Bucks, and takes varying amounts of time to complete. Most will take you a few missions to complete, but if you're smart and stack them up while ditching the hardest ones — you can swap out one daily quest per day — you can finish multiple quests at once.

Time to go attack some seesaws for some reason! Epic Games via Polygon

But you'll need to set aside maybe a few hours per week to do them all, which may or may not be worth the time commitment for the 350 weekly V-Bucks.

If you get good at knocking these down while moving ahead in the main questline however, you'll start to see the V-Bucks pile up pretty rapidly.

The collection book is a great short-term V-Buck machine

You'll be earning schematics and characters as you play through the game, and you can place those that you don't mind getting rid of forever in your collection book to earn experience points. The rarer the character or schematic, the more points you get for putting it in your book — where you'll never be able to use it — and you get 500 V-Bucks for getting your collection book to level six, and 500 more for getting to level 26.

Save the World throws items at you, to the point where it's kind of annoying to sit through the animations, honestly, so getting to these goals isn't tough. I didn't particularly put any effort into leveling my book up, and I was able to grab the 1,000 V-Bucks almost as an afterthought.

Cartoon Network That's a lot of free V-Bucks, isn't it?

I wouldn't put it that way, actually. They're "free" in that they would have cost you money if you purchased them directly through the store, but you're still paying Epic Games and playing Fortnite to get 'em. If it feels like a good deal to you and it's worth the time, this is a pretty solid way of earning V-Bucks for more cosmetic items in Battle Royale, but you can still just ignore the skin economy completely or pay directly for your V-Bucks instead of paying in time.

But I enjoy playing the meta-game of trying to get "free" stuff out of games, and I've started to take Save the World more seriously as a place to farm V-Bucks. The game isn't bad; it's just not as fun as Battle Royale, but the time needed on a daily basis to get at least some of these missions and quests finished isn't too taxing. It's up to you whether tracking everything and maximizing your V-Buck strategies is worth the money you're saving, or whether playing in this way is fun at all. You may find yourself enjoying the game mode more than you had expected. But the V-Buck rewards for playing Save the World, as we've seen in this article, can be great.

My last note, however, is kind of serious: Don't be a tourist. Prioritizing V-Bucks isn't the worst thing, but your games are often going to be filled with other players who enjoy Save the World, and want to play with people who aren't just using it for in-game cash. Try to help out when you can, be nice and try to remain respectful of the game everyone is trying to play, even if your goals are different.

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