Fans are scrambling to solve the mystery of Fortnite's looming meteor

Fortnite Battle Royale fans have been scrambling to make sense of mysterious new in-game phenomenon, all seemingly related to the strange meteor that's been hanging in the sky above the map for at least a week now.

While some players intially dismissed Fortnite Battle Royale's meteor as an extended April Fool's joke, other community members elected to take its continued - and rapidly enlarging - presence above the urban sprawl of Tilted Towers more seriously.

The fact that the meteor's unheralded arrival was accompanied by the discovery of other oddities around the Battle Royale map, only served to further ignite community curiosity. Last week, for instance, non-interactive telescopes - all aimed at the meteor - began to appear across the map. More puzzling, however, was the revelation that certain in-game locations were seemingly causing controllers to emit specific rumbles.

It didn't take long for the community (with assistance from Reddit user vigilancefoetracer) to notice that the rumbling patterns - initially dismissed, rather unconvincingly, by the Fortnite Twitter team as a bug - actually spelled out a message in Morse code: SOS D5 418.

Currently, the most widely accepted interpretation of this array seems to be that the '418' refers to either April 2018 or April 18th, while D5 appears to be a grid reference pointing, suspiciously, back to Tilted Towers. The SOS, of course, is pretty self-explanatory.

There's also a separate, more outlandish theory that Fortnite's map is based on Poland, featuring many parallel locations. In this scenario, Tilted Towers' position appears to correlate with Polish city Poznan, home of the Morasko Meteorite Reserve. And then there's this:

As a result, fans now believe that Epic has something dramatic planned for the end of Fortnite's currently ongoing (and notably space-themed) Season 3, due to reach its conclusion on April 30th. Many are speculating that, when the time is right, the mysterious meteor will smash into Tilted Towers, levelling one of the most controversial areas on Fortnite's map.

Tilted Towers, for the uninitiated, is a busy sprawl of skyscrapers - ideal for easy sniper kills - that a lot of players believe is sucking the life out of Fortnite. Not only does it contain plentiful loot, immediately drawing players toward it, its central location makes it a popular, and easy destination to reach, reducing player counts elsewhere on the map. As such, there are perfectly legitimate gameplay reasons why Epic might want it gone - and a meteor-themed in-game extinction event is a fun, immersive way of eradicating it.

Epic, however, is now remaining tightlipped about Fortnite's recently uncovered mysteries, happy to let fan speculation continue unhindered until their secrets are ready to be revealed.