Join our next UEFN Build Along Livestream: Custom Items and Inventory – April 28

General Announcements
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Tune in on 2026-04-28T18:00:00Z for a Custom Items and Inventory build-along to learn how you can create custom items with unique properties, design gameplay that reacts to player inventories, and build systems like in-game economies and crafting mechanics.

We’ll show you how, step by step, with practical examples you can apply to your own projects.

Join us live

Unreal Engine Youtube

Fortnite Create Youtube

Unreal Engine Twitch

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Just from what one saw there

(not sure how it would be for verse and access control to persistence and how it would go with the current entity custom inventory, group components? making a dirty rabbit hole to components)

seems like one want an “UI ItemStation, UI ItemInventory” both as device and in the component? to enable UI widget for item inventory, or instead have an default UI ItemInventory that can add the ItemStation to, like an crafting bench, a station that wants either item points or UI, or mix. (becomes a lot of widgets).

  • item station for trade points, for single user or multiple users if free for all or team approved (trading, exchange, crafting)(private, private + public setting, public).
  • Used for more public inventories from the standard iteminventory, that can be publicly viewed or enable shared access.
  • using like the team UI, in a stackbox of widgets, switching between stackboxes for each player or show multiple stackboxes in same view with the widgets or switch between them.
  • the use of “local/you own widget” to “current player’s inventory ___” and “other players/team widget” (and bindings) assigned to the stackboxes?

Then maybe an ItemInventory_AccessManager

  • Who will have access and when, can be tied to player triggers?
  • Unlock, lock access?
  • All, Access ID, or assigned player or players, with some management options?

Future?

ItemInventory_UI_Manager

on drag, drop, pickup, selected or selected function in the inventory UI

sorter settings and weights using default sorting widget?

triggers or functions when doing any of that above, or to make for example scrolling component to go faster when holding item, or search for selected item in inventory.

trigger events able to use verse field variables? might be like “on picked up or clicked on “show inventory” in this inventory, open widget UI for egg storage”. then be it exit current, open new widget and wait, or return back upon closing said widget, nothing, as options.

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Hello everybody!

I’ve been watching the livestream, and I’m here to solve some of the unanswered questions! Hope this helps people to dig deeper into UEFN! Let’s star with question 1.

Question 1) How would you give enemies/creatures an inventory that drops loot?

There are multiple approaches to do that. I’m gonna explain two of them, one with devices only, and another one using verse.

A) With devices only:
The first and easiest way is to add an Elimination Manager device to your Island (only for creatures available in the device’s dropdown menu). You only need to set the number of items to drop, the list of items that can be dropped, the drop rate, and which kind of eliminations will be affected by this specific Elimination Manager.

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Of course, you can create multiple Elimination Managers with different loot for each creature type in your island, and turn them on and off based on your current Island state!
Quick clarification on this method: for wildlife, you need to choose the specific wildlife creature you want to drop items from the Elimination Manager, as it doesn’t work if you set it to “All Creatures”.
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B) With Verse coding:
You can also create a custom Verse device to manage the drop. Even if the result seems to be the same, this will give you more freedom to control what you drop, when, and where! With this method you will be able to expand the code to add different item pools, different drop rates for each item, etc. I have an example of this in this post: Anyone able to get creatures to drop loot? - #4 by BRGJuanCruzMK
Feel free to copy it and experiment by changing anything!

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Question 2) Is it possible to override current Fortnite item meshes?

The short answer for this is “no, you can’t” but the good news is that you will be able to create your own items in the future! Right now, UEFN has an experimental feature called Scene Graph (turning this on will prevent you from publishing your Island, so test it on a different one!), this new feature will allow you to create your own items, with their own meshes and icons! Here is a video explaining how it works specifically for that

But if the “items” you want to change are weapons, there is a way to create custom weapons using Verse, custom meshes, and placing those meshes over the actual Fortnite weapon. Here is a video that explains how:

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Question 3) In terms of memory and optimization, having too many custom items visible on game can be bad for the game performance?

Yes, it can and it will! Having too many custom items visible on game can affect performance and memory usage, making your Island unplayable depending on user’s platform, or even preventing you from publishing it due to memory usage calculation failure! You can check more on this topic in this document (specially in the section “How Memory Gets Calculated”): Memory Management in Unreal Editor for Fortnite | Fortnite Documentation | Epic Developer Community

In that document, you can also read about how to improve your Island’s performance and get advantage of those methods to “save” memory for your custom objects!

Aaaaand that’s it, developers! Hope this clarifies some of your doubts and helps you to create the best possible experiences!

Have a really good day!

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