A quick and strategic landing can make a tremendous difference to your performance in Fortnite Battle Royale. Descending fast enough can give you a tactical head start against your opponents, providing you with enough lead time to loot and equip. With the right landing strategy, players can get to the ground within the first ten seconds of the game, and, in the right landing location, it can give them ample time to access and raid loot crates before their foes. 

The funny thing about effective landings is that the game itself doesn’t explain the mechanics behind it, leaving it to the players to figure it out. The secret to a perfect landing lies in taking advantage of the game’s physics while using a little finesse. This begins with the jump off.

Merely dropping straight down from your battle bus once it’s at the right spot is not all that effective and is much slower than if you jumped off from an angle. This is due to Fortnite’s two basic landing mechanics: skydiving and gliding. 

A skydive is essentially a freefall, which continues until you get close enough to the ground before the parachute engages.  Gliding, meanwhile, happens when the parachute—either a glider or an umbrella—is engaged at any time during the descent, letting you drift slowly downwards. Overall, skydiving is much faster than gliding.

The first tip toward getting to the ground quickly is to spend as much of your descent in free fall. Whereas jumping straight down engages the gliding mechanism faster, jumping from an angle allows more distance to be covered by skydiving.

The glider is a key factor to consider when making a quick landing. It shouldn’t be deployed too early as it could slow down the rapid descent.  Because you cannot switch from gliding to skydiving once the glider engages, it is important to make sure that you delay this for as long as you can. 

While it seems tempting to choose upper elevations such as outcrops and buildings to get to the ground quicker, this is actually counterintuitive. As the game automatically deploys parachutes the closer you get to solid ground, you’d actually spend a lot more time drifting slowly trying to target a higher elevation. At times, these locations may be sound targets when they have valuables such as loot boxes or bullseye target, but otherwise you should ignore them.  

Instead, skydive all the way down toward patches of land that are at the lowest possible altitude. By choosing lower elevations, you free yourself from having to worry about deploying the gliders.

The gliders work solely on this principle. There’s no way to upgrade the glider to make you drift down faster as all customization on the glider is purely cosmetic. Since both the glider and the umbrella function identically, there’s no advantage in picking one or the other.

As with all things in gameplay, the secret to mastering the landing is practice. With a lot of patience and perseverance, you will learn how to properly gauge the angle to jump off from the Battle Bus to reach your desired starting location.