One of the mechanics involved in playing Fortnite Save the World is evolving your weapons. It’s quite a complex mechanic to understand at first.
As you progress through the different skill trees, you will unlock nodes which allow you to evolve melee weapons, shotguns etc. You need to focus on evolving the right types of weapons at the right time.
Many players (like myself) make the mistake of evolving as soon as possible. The issue is, if you’ve just hit the Plankerton area and decide to evolve a shotgun to star level 3, it requires completely different materials. In this case, Malachite.
You can’t actually find malachite until you reach the later stages of Plankerton and early parts of the next area. Therefor, you can’t actually craft your weapon as you don’t have the right materials! What I’m trying to say is, don’t focus on evolving weapons as soon as possible, as it might screw you over in the long run.
Below, we have a quick guide on how to level up, upgrade and evolve your weapons and traps in Fortnite Save the World. You can find some more Fortnite guides here.
Evolving Weapons in Fortnite
As I said, you need to unlock the required nodes in the skill tree to evolve weapons. You don’t unlock the additional nodes until Skill tree 2, so until then, you can evolve weapons until level 2 without the skill tree.
To start, head into your armoury and choose the item you want to evolve. It could be a weapon, a hero, defender, trap or anything else that can be upgraded. In this case, I’m evolving a melee weapon. From your inventory, select the item and choose “Upgrade/Inspect”.

Before it can be evolved for the first time, it needs to be levelled up 10 times. Every 10 levels, you can evolve a weapon to the next level. Use your schematic XP to get it to level 10. If it just says max level reached like the image below, go back to the armoury and select it again to update it.

Next, you will see the ‘Evolve button’. Press it, and you will be shown a list of required ingredients and items required to evolve it. In my case, I require 2500 Schematic XP, 20 Pure drops of rain and 3 weapon designs. If you have these items, press Evolve!

Your item will have been evolved to the next star rating. You can go ahead and even level it up another 10 times to get to the next star rating.