If you’ve been trying to collect all the Alien Artifacts, you may have found that there’s no way you can get enough to buy all of Kymera’s customization options. That’s where Cosmic Chests come in. What is a Cosmic Chest in Fortnite exactly, and what do you do with them?
The aliens have taken an interest in Slurpy Swamp, clear the area and investigate.
— Fortnite (@FortniteGame) August 11, 2021
Their movements seem random, but there must be a pattern.
Complete this week's Quest now! pic.twitter.com/dj1EYQC3y8
What is a Cosmic Chest in Fortnite?
You could go through the entire season without every encountering a Cosmic Chest. That’s because they only spawn in Duos and Squads. If you fly solo all the time, you will quite literally never encounter these or know they exist.
Cosmic Chests offer a sort of mini-game for your team. They spawn randomly on the map, and looks like a chest suspended in a crystal. When you get close to one, it’ll ping itself and start an Urgent Quest to find it.
When you get to the chest, you and your team need to take turns smacking the crystal’s weak points with your Harvesting Tool in the allotted time. Breaking through the crystal grants a Chest for each player, that is one Chest will appear to each player that the others can’t see.
Cosmic Chests don’t just appear in casual playlists, as you can encounter them in Arena modes as well.
The sweet loot inside will be two Rare or higher weapons, and some Alien Artifacts. You can only collect 15 Alien Artifacts a week this way, so if you’ve been behind on them it may be difficult to 100% the Kymera pieces.
The Alien Artifact counter for Cosmic Chests resets for the Tuesday server update.
With Chapter 2 Season expected to end mid-September, that leaves just four weeks to get the rest of the Alien Artifacts. Of course, this means you can only earn 60 unless Epic Games decides to throw players a bone and offer another way to get Alien Artifacts.