Every metric on IslandRank comes from the official Fortnite Ecosystem API published by Epic Games. The API exposes daily statistics for every public Fortnite Creative island, including:
Unique players - distinct people who played the map on a given day
Minutes played - total time across all sessions
Average minutes per player - how long a single visit lasts on average
Sessions (plays) - how many distinct play sessions occurred
Recommendations - how many players actively recommended the map
Favorites - how many players added the map to their favorites
Day-1 retention - the fraction of players who came back the day after their first visit
Day-7 retention - the fraction still playing a week later
We collect a fresh snapshot every night. The snapshot from the last complete day is used to compute the rankings - today's in-progress values are excluded to avoid bias from partial data.
How we rank
We combine multiple quality and adoption signals into a single Trend Score between 0 and 100. The methodology favors maps with both strong engagement (players spending real time on a map and coming back) and meaningful adoption (a sizable audience), and it includes statistical adjustments to prevent very small player samples from distorting the ranking.
Two principles guide the formula:
Engagement and return matter more than raw clicks. A map that a hundred people come back to every day is more valuable than one that a thousand try once.
Small samples deserve caution. Metrics from a map with very few players can swing wildly day to day, so we apply standard statistical adjustments to give more weight to maps with established, consistent activity.
The exact weighting is something we refine over time as the Fortnite Creative ecosystem evolves and as we learn more about what makes a map genuinely fun.
Top Trend vs Hidden Gems
The site shows two rankings because they serve different intents:
Top Trend - the best maps overall, blending popularity and quality. This is what most visitors look at first: the maps that combine real adoption with real engagement.
Hidden Gems - restricted to maps with 100 to 1,500 unique daily players, ranked on quality alone. These are smaller maps with disproportionately strong signals: the kind of mid-sized hits that have not yet broken into the mainstream but deserve attention.
Limits and honesty
Two things to keep in mind:
Epic only exposes public data for islands with enough activity. Maps below the threshold return null values from the API and are not rankable on IslandRank, no matter how recently they were published.
The Fortnite Ecosystem API was opened to all creator islands in 2025; some data fields are still maturing. We always use the most recent complete day and revisit the methodology as the data improves.
Daily, weekly, monthly
The rankings update every day. As our system accumulates historical snapshots, weekly rankings activate after seven days of data, monthly rankings after thirty. The Today tab shows the latest complete day; the Week and Month tabs aggregate longer windows for a more stable view of which maps are sustainably loved.
The full source of truth is the API itself. We don't scrape, we don't accept submissions: the rankings are a daily-refreshed transformation of public data through our own ranking methodology.