How To Use Preferred Item Slots In Fortnite

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In Fortnite battle royale, sometimes the difference between winning and losing comes down to who can navigate their inventory fastest. If you find yourself desperately swapping weapons to the point where you might be tossing health kits at opponents as you fumble through your virtual pockets, it might be time to use Preferred Item Slots, a fairly new quality-of-life feature that allows you to semi-automate the process of organizing your loot. Here's how to use Preferred Item Slots in Fortnite.

Fortnite - Preferred Item Slots

To find the Preferred Item Slots menu, head into Fortnite's settings and scroll to the second tab, called simply "Game" settings and depicted by a gear icon. Scroll to Preferred Item Slots and select "Configure."

This will open up a customization menu that you'll need to tweak to your liking. What Preferred Item Slots does is automatically move certain loot to certain spots in your five-slot inventory space as decided by your presets. Say, for example, you really like to have your assault rifle as your leftmost item, followed by an SMG, and then a sniper, before filling the right side of your inventory with throwables like firefly jars and healing items like Slurp Juice. With Preferred Item Slots, the game will stick each of those loot items into their designated spot in your inventory, so you always know where they are.

The system only functions properly if you don't have your five slots filled. Once you do, the game reverts back to manual adjustments, with the exception of higher-rarity loot replacing lesser loot of the same variety. For example, if you set your shotgun slot to be the second-from-the-left inventory space and find an orange shotgun while holding a blue shotgun, your custom pecking order that is Preferred Item Slots will swap out the lower-ranking shotty for the better one in your designated shotgun slot.

This system is especially useful early in the game when you first land. It erases the need to be mindful of where certain items are going in your inventory because you can trust they've gone precisely where you'd like and expect them to go. That can save your life when you land in a hot drop.

You'll want to experiment with different configurations if you don't yet know what you're most comfortable with, and once you do figure it out, be sure to select Apply in the menu so you can save your changes. You're already playing with Preferred Item Slots, and have been since the feature was brought to Fortnite during the summer of 2021, so if you haven't customized it yet, you're just playing with the default options. If you feel they're lacking, get in there and change things more to your liking. Then you can spend less time fumbling in the inventory screen like it's Resident Evil and more time emoting on defeated enemies' killcams... with the characters from Resident Evil.