If you’ve been looking to track your Fortnite time played, Epic hasn’t made that easy, disabling the feature earlier this year in an effort to reduce server load. But that doesn’t mean the feature’s dead, as your time stats are still being tracked – just locally, in the game’s config files.
You can find the stat in the GameUserSettings.ini file – located at AppData / Local / FortniteGame / Saved/Config / WindowsClient. Scroll down, and you’ll find the SimpleMobileStats tracker, which shows GamesPlayed, SecondsPlayed, KillCount, and BestResult.
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For the mathematically challenged among you, you can divided SecondsPlayed by 60 to find out how many minutes you have in Fortnite, then by 60 again to figure out your hours played. The timer ticks up while you’re in-game, but not during menu screens.
But the details of the stat remain somewhat mysterious. Several people in a recent Reddit thread have noted that the stat doesn’t seem to accurately reflect their actual time played. Some speculate that this is in fact just keeping track of your in-game time since Epic stopped tracking via its own servers.
That would mean this stat could be combined with the existing time played stat still held server-side – assuming, of course, that’s how this works. Until someone does the math against an external method of tracking or Epic finally re-enables it, we’re not gonna know for sure. Either way, tracking the time in a config file seems like it’d completely bust the system open with trivial stat hacks.
Time played tracking was disabled back in February to “alleviate stress on our back-end services.” That action was intended to be a temporary one, but it’s obviously been quite a while, and player profile pages have been showing the same stat since February. Sites like Wasted on Fortnite aim to offer third-party tracking, but with proper tracking disabled they rely on some potentially inaccurate estimates.
Epic’s certainly got bigger fish to fry with the Fortnite season 5 release date coming up tomorrow, but it’s good to know they still have an eye on your time played in the meantime.