Fortnite Shadow Stones just got pulled

If you've been roaming Fortnite's map looking for the game's new consumable items, Shadow Stones, you can stop looking for now. Though Fortnite's season 6 patch went live only yesterday, Shadow Stones have already been removed from the game. As it turns out, Shadow Stones were glitched upon release, and in a way that could make players vastly overpowered.

Here's the way Shadow Stones are supposed to work: upon picking one up, players would enter Shadow Form for 45 seconds. While in Shadow Form, players move faster, jump higher, and can even phase through objects, but they can't use their weapons. They're also still visible to enemy players, but standing still makes them completely invisible.

Shadow Stones sound like fairly balanced items on paper, but an issue with them meant that sometimes the user would turn completely invisible with only their weapons visible and still usable. A Reddit thread detailing this glitch gained a lot of traction in a short amount of time, and it wasn't long after that Epic announced it would disable Shadow Stones until it can come up with a fix.

We don't know when Shadow Stones will return, but hopefully it's only a few days until Epic has these problems hammered out. Then again, Shadow Stones add a lot of new mechanics and interactions for a single item, so it could take a while to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it.

Shadow Stones were only a small part of all the content launched with Fortnite's season 6 update. After appearing last season, the mysterious cube has corrupted many areas of Fortnite's map, and for the first time, pets are available as an unlockable cosmetic (assuming, of course, that you've purchased a Battle Pass). We'll keep an ear to the ground for more on the fate of Shadow Stones, so stay tuned for that.