Fortnite Chapter 5 Season 3: Start Date, Collabs, Leaks, Rumors, And Everything Else We Know

Currently, Season 2 is slated to end on May 24, which is a Friday. Usually, that means that Fortnite’s season will end very early in the morning on the 24th in the US, around 4 AM ET, and then the game will go down for maintenance for several hours.

If all goes as planned, Season 3 will begin several hours later on the morning of May 24. But we’re not making any promises on that–Season 2 had a very messy launch that saw Fortnite stay offline in maintenance for nearly a day.

Not in the “everybody logs on at noon on a Saturday for a big show” sense, no. But, like how Season 1 ended with the big hand emerging from the ground with Pandora’s Box, the battle royale map is changing in real time, electrifying the giant statue at Mt. Olympus and lighting up Pandora’s Box where it sits in the center of the island. After a couple days of lightning strikes, Pandora’s Box sank into the lake and the storm clouds around the statue dissipated–but now the statue is all cracked up, and we can see a huge incoming storm to the south of the island, filled with dust and ominous red lightning.

On May 17, Epic revealed the main collaboration for Chapter 5 Season 3: the Fallout video game franchise. This teaser image is the entire announcement of this collab, so we have very few specifics about what this will entail. But clearly there will be at least one new Fallout-themed location, and Brotherhood of Steel power armor will likely be a battle pass skin. And I would be very surprised if we don’t get some vault dweller skins, though that could be a shop thing.

Over the weekend, we also got a 15-second cinematic teaser that showed off the season’s vehicular focus, which you can watch here. The fine print on this teaser mentions Epic Games and ZeniMax (which owns Fallout) as expected–and also Marvel. Having a Marvel copyright on a trailer usually means there’s a Marvel thing in the trailer, though it’s hardly obvious what it could be. We’re going to have to wait a minute to find out, it looks like.

On Tuesday, we got a new teaser that’s only two seconds long–but that two seconds has far more substance than the 15-second teaser did. Here we can see sets of T-60 power armor, with three distinct styles, as well as six guns that currently are not in the loot pool (at least two of them–a Fallout-themed laser rifle and a massive harpoon gun–are new), along with a new consumable item that seems to make you run faster.

This image appears to tease a new battle royale location called the Nitro Drome, which seems to be some sort of vehicular combat arena. The name of this spot may indicate that rumors of a Mad Max collaboration are false, because the name “Nitro Drome” has serious offbrand Thunderdome sort of energy.

Likewise, another teaser image revealed on Wednesday had a similar sort of vibe–the ruthless leader in the image certainly has the feel of “Immortan Joe at home.” This person actually appears to be a returning Fortnite person, however–he looks like a new, rebuilt version of Gunnar, who was an NPC boss during Chapter 3 Season 2 before a tank fell on his head during the season-ending live event.

Aside from what’s been teased, another random tidbit we know about next season is it should bring the long-awaited integration of Fall Guys into the Fortnite ecosystem. We don’t know what all that will entail, but it’s expected that Fall Guys will be playable inside Fortnite in some manner as a UEFN creation, that UEFN creators will be able to use Fall Guys props in their own games, and that there will be Fall Guys-related stuff in battle royale modes as well. Though all this may not happen at the same time.

Other than that, the only other certainty is that Season 3 will give us Fortnite’s annual summer event in July.

Recently, Epic’s alleged roadmap for the Fortnite ecosystem in 2024 emerged from the bowels of the internet, and it gained a lot of credibility in the eyes of the community when its prediction that Billie Eilish would be the next Fortnite Festival icon turned out to be correct. Since it’s a roadmap for the whole year, it’s got some big potential details about Chapter 5 Season 3.

First, the roadmap’s image for the summer season is a post-apocalyptic-looking loading screen–the Fallout collab obviously lines up with that. But there have been separate leaks about vehicular combat, and May 24 is also the day that Furiosa hits theaters, so that could also figure into this somehow.

Meanwhile, the roadmap also lists a Pirates of the Caribbean collab during this period, so maybe the long-rumored Jack Sparrow skin could be the bonus skin in the battle pass, or the subject of an event.

A new season of Fortnite Festival will begin on June 13, just a few weeks into Chapter 5, Season 3. We’ve got no information or rumors about it, save what the alleged roadmap says: Metallica is Season 4’s featured artist.

Rocket Racing is currently in the midst of its first season of content, Neon Rush, and it’s safe to expect major updates in the next few months as Epic continues to support its fledgling racer. The alleged leaked roadmap seems to indicate that the next Neon Rush-level update will kick off a volcano theme.

Separately, there’s a rumor that battle royale players will soon be able to customize SUVs the same way they currently can with sports cars, which should also apply to Rocket Racing, allowing some of Rocket League’s boxier car types to finally cross over.

Lego Fortnite has begun its summer season already with this Star Wars event–Fortnite’s new Star Wars-themed Lego Pass and Star Wars story content will run until late July.

Beyond what’s been mentioned above, Fortnite leakers and dataminers had been indicating for a while that new waves of My Hero Academia and Jujutsu Kaisen cosmetics are on the way–and while new MHA stuff has already appeared and is currently in the shop, wave 2 of Jujutsu Kaisen has not. Keep in mind also that Jujutsu Kaisen was last summer’s big collab event, so maybe they like that summer window.

We’ll add more rumors, leaks, and official news here as it all comes in.