Fortnite Pirate Shop Token guide: How to improve your chances of getting Pirate Shop Access

Fortnite’s Pirate Shop Token is one of the most popular time-limited ideas the game has come up with in a while, with hordes of players coming back to the game to look for them.

If you can find a Pirate Shop Token you’ll be able to unlock many hundreds of dollars’ worth of Fortnite content, but naturally that means it’s not easy to get.

There have been countless theories and rumours spreading on social media about how to get the Pirate Shop Token, so I’ve put this guide together to separate the fact from fiction, and give you the best possible chance of finding one.

Read up on everything below, and you’ll know everything there is to know for now about the Pirate Shop Tokens. If Epic shares more information in the coming weeks, I’ll update this guide accordingly.

What are Fortnite Pirate Shop Tokens?

If you’re just finding out about this now, Pirate Shop Tokens were added to Fortnite as part of its current mini-season, Fortnite Treasure Hunters, which started on November 1.

The season is set to end on December 5, meaning it will only last for around a month, which makes finding a Pirate Shop Token even more stressful.

Throughout the season, a Treasure Hunt feature has been added to Battle Royale mode, where every time you open or break a chest, there’s a small chance that you’ll get a treasure reward.

One of the rarest of these rewards is what players are calling a Pirate Token, which gives access to the Pirate Shop.

If you’re lucky enough to find it, you’ll actually receive two tokens – one which can be activated at any point in 2026 between November 1 and December 15, and one which can be activated at any point in 2027 between January 1 and December.

When you activate a token, every single item in the Fortnite Shop which costs V-Bucks becomes entirely free for the next 14 days.

The only catches are you can’t claim Battle Pass levels, you can’t get bundles that cost real money (instead of V-Bucks), you can’t gift items to other players, and you can only claim one free sidekick.

Everything else – skins, emotes, backpacks, pickaxes, instruments, cars, gliders, jam tracks – is entirely free for you to claim, as if you were buying it with V-Bucks.

Obviously, then, these are enormously valuable items, because on a good day you can claim many hundreds of dollars’ worth of content for free.

How do you find Fortnite Pirate Shop Tokens?

Now that it’s clear what the Pirate Shop Tokens do, the next obvious question is how to actually get one.

The good news is that everyone who plays Fortnite has an equal chance of finding a Pirate Shop Token. The bad news is there’s a big random element to it.

To find one, you have to open chests during Battle Royale and Zero Build modes. This can be any type of chest, including:

• Normal chests
• Rare chests
• Sprite Chests
• Buried Chests
• Wanted Poster Chests
• Relic Chests

Every time you open a chest, you have a slight chance of also getting a Treasure Hunt prize. This won’t come out of the chest like the usual weapons and other items, so you won’t have to pick it up – you’ll just get a message on the screen telling you what you got.

Treasure Hunt prizes are split into three tiers – Standard, Major and Supreme. If it’s standard you’ll get either a Sprite Locator, Lucky Locator, Golden Firework, Extraction Accelerator or Portable Extractor.

If it’s Major you’ll get one of the current week’s special cosmetics, which at the time of writing include a Mercedes AMG truck and A$AP Rocky’s solid gold Gauntlets. And if it’s Supreme, you’ll get one of two things – that week’s gold skin (currently the Solid Gold A$AP Rocky) or the Pirate Shop Token.

What are the odds on finding a Fortnite Pirate Shop Token?

While Epic hasn’t yet fully confirmed the odds on getting a Treasure Hunt roll and then finding a Pirate Shop Token, people have been making wild guesses on social media, with one rumour doing the rounds that you have a 1 in 70,000 chance of getting one. Don’t worry, that appears to be nonsense.

So far the most detailed guess has come from X user Blortzen, who has made some educated guesses based on statistics they’ve been studying.

Obviously these numbers are not definite, but Blortzen estimates that your chance of getting a Treasure Hunt roll are roughly 1 in every 100 chests you open.

Once you get one, the game then decides whether you get a Standard, Major or Supreme tier reward. You should get Standard 60-70%, Major 20-25% and Supreme just 5-10%.

What this means is that your chance of opening a chest and getting a Treasure Hunt roll, then that roll being a Supreme reward, then that reward being the Pirate Shop Token, are estimated at roughly 1 in 2,000 chests.

That obviously doesn’t mean it’s as simple as opening 2,000 chests and getting the Token, of course. The law of probabilities means your luck could go either way – you might get one after just a few hundred chests, or you could spend the next month opening thousands of them and never find one.

One thing to note, however, is that when you get one of the two Supreme rewards, it disappears from the list of possible rewards. This means if you roll a Supreme and get the Solid Gold A$AP Rocky skin, the next time you roll a Supreme it’ll definitely be the Pirate Shop Token.

This means if you’re lucky (or unlucky!) enough to get the Solid Gold A$AP Rocky skin, from that point on your chances of getting the Pirate Shop Token improve from 1 in 2,000 to a still very rare 1 in 1,000.

As far as anyone can tell, you can’t do anything to improve these odds. There are rumours flying around everywhere – some people think new or returning players are being rewarded with the Token quicker, others think you have to wear a One Piece skin or find some sort of Token Compass which points them towards one, or that some chests give better odds than others.

These are all nonsense – according to Epic games, everyone has an equal chance of finding a Pirate Shop Token. There’s no such thing as a Token Compass, and the skin you choose has no effect on your odds – just focus on opening chests.

Tips on finding the Fortnite Pirate Shop Token faster

Although you can’t increase your chances of finding a Pirate Shop Token every time you open a chest, there are some other steps you can follow to at least improve your odds in other ways.

The main tip doing the rounds is to play in a Squad. If you don’t have friends to play with you, just choose the Fill option to add random players to your squad of four.

The reason for this is that if anyone in your Squad finds the Pirate Shop Token in a chest, every member of the Squad gets it. This technically means that in each round you’re opening four times as many chests as usual.

The random element of Squad Fill means there will be times when this works better than others. There are some out there (who are fools) who are just playing AFK and hoping someone else does the work and gets the token for them. If this happens, do the right thing and report those players – they don’t deserve the token.

There are others (who aren’t fools) who are just trying to play Battle Royale as normal, and that can’t be helped, so don’t give them a hard time for playing the game their way. They’ll naturally open a few chests in the course of their playthrough anyway, and every little helps.

By and large, though, playing in Squads will still at least lead to you have more chances per game than if you were playing solo.

There are other tips doing the rounds but they come with their own warnings. Some people say you should head straight for Lantern Landing when you start a game because there are a lot of chests in a small area, meaning you can get a good start on opening as many chests as you can.

The problem with this, of course, is that lots of other players will be heading for Lantern Landing too, meaning your chances of getting killed right away are greater. What takes more time: opening 20 chests elsewhere in the world, or trying to open 20 in one area, getting killed right away and having to wait for the next game to start?

Most likely, the best chance you have is to play in a Squad (either of your own friends, or using Fill), picking a random location on the map, and just looking for as many chests as you can find, making sure you at least collect enough weapons from some of them that you can defend yourself if you need to.

Keep going, keep your fingers crossed and with any luck you’ll finally get there.