INB4 anyone asks - I completed Frozen Fjords (Hero Modifiers), Scurvy Shoals (Bouncy Husks and Treasure Modifiers), and Blasted Badlands (Energy/Ability Modifiers), just because said modifiers interested me the most

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Back in late 2025, I had pretty much fulfilled my checklist on vital and decent heroes, weapons, and loadouts in Save the World. To celebrate said personal achievement, I gave myself a fun challenge - Give Ventures another try to test and see if I made enough progress from the past 2-3 years of collecting and grinding. When I first took STW seriously between late 2022 and 2023, I wanted to dip my toes into Ventures to explore what it’s like going beyond the normal genre of STW. During said time, I lacked proper loadouts, heroes, and weapons to progress as proficiently as possible. Thus I forced myself to fully understand the gist of STW and reach late Twine so that I would be better prepared.

And here we are. 2026. What a journey it has been. Maybe the Ventures was the variety I encountered along the way. So I come to you all right now as I share my personal thoughts on each Venture season I fully completed.

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Frozen Fjords

By far and easily my favorite Ventures season. The Hero Modifiers gimmick spiced up the gameplay a ton and encouraged me to have a variety of builds and weapons ready to take on progressively harder enemies. Highly recommend starting Ventures during this time as the hero modifiers are a great hands-on tool to make Ventures grinding fun while helping to introduce players to the mechanics of this mode.

Scurvy Shoals

So far my least favorite journey of the three, due to the rampant rise of matchmaking issues and Hestia straight up breaking everything, as well as dealing with extremely difficult personal times during this time period. I decided to give this season a try to prove to a friend that it is one of if not, the easiest and most laid back seasons to grind, thanks to the Bouncy Husks and Treasure modifier. Looting was made easier this season, which helped ease pressure as I made my way through. This season also coincided with the Supply Drop Rework, making the looting aspect 10x more valuable and vital. Because enemies were more tanky but were very vulnerable to knockback, it encouraged players to utilize stall builds as much as possible, thus helping to make tire traps, launcher traps, freezes, lights, and sound walls shine. Because of the aforementioned rampant issues, I was forced to rely on carries/taxis to bypass these hindrances. As a result, progression was much faster than FF, all at the cost of valuable time needed to experiment and maximize potential of stall builds and looting.

Blasted Badlands

A season that interested me the most, with heavy emphasis on BFTP and abilities. This season also introduced PWO, which was desperately needed ever since Ventures was introduced. Issues from last season stuck around, thus prompting me to still rely on carries here and there. PWO helped a decent ton to progress faster, which was 100% expected. This season tested my ability to utilize BFTP-ability hybrid builds, from infinite miniguns to Teddy spams to dragon slashes… and Goin Constructor. A few things I took away from this journey was that normal Happy Holiday Teddy builds reigned supreme here, as fragments did not consume energy and significantly reduced cooldown of fragment abilities. Miniguns and Dragon Slash builds were still able to shine, however the ability build I was eager to try the most was Goin Constructor. The Hotwire build is heavily slept on, despite its nature attacks being useless against fire husks. Still, it was a beast (totally not a pun), being capable of deleting decently sized crowds with its nature and energy overcharge attacks. The Riggs build intrigued me a ton, as it proved that duration based heroes shine the most during this season, bypassing most of its cooldowns a ton.

Despite matchmaking issues and yet another busy personal time for me, I managed to get this season done last night, and I was grateful to see the potential of most ability builds. Goin Constructor fiddling was a highlight, and I highly recommend this a ton for Constructor Power Hour, Blasted Badlands, and Frozen Fjords runs.

Key Takeaways

- Ventures is proof that variety is the way to go in STW. Gameplay finally felt refreshing for once after playing with randomly rolled weapons and non-meta hero builds, as well as partial game-changing modifiers to spice up progression. I cannot stress enough how important variety is to ensure you actually enjoy playing STW

- Carries are simply the fastest way to go to get to Level 50 as fast as possible. Not heavily relying on maxing difficulty all the time is also crucial to save time and efficiency when playing through every season.

- PWO is somewhat vital to also progress fast. Being able to find a lobby to try and farm quests and ventures XP ASAP is necessary to reduce pressure and stress when grinding.

- Having defenders deployed with your rolled weapons from the normal mode was an interesting choice. Imo while it did a lot to make not only missions but elim quests easier, it somewhat took away the sense of challenge in Ventures. The whole point of Ventures is to start from scratch, and then rely on looting and maxxing difficulty to get to the end, while having good hero builds. Using defenders to “cheese progression” doesn’t sit right with me, but i’ll admit it was cool watching spawns get nuked by defenders’ sci-fi weapons

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Overall, if there was one thing Ventures taught me, it’s that META is not the way to play progression-like games. We need to shine a light on the importance of variety and understand that different gameplay helps players stick around in the long run. Meta is simply just short term fun, while Variety is slow but proficient long term fun.

Anything I forgot to mention here will be put in the comments, feel free to chime in y’all’s thoughts on ventures so I can bring them up there.

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TL;DR: Ventures offers a refreshing type of gameplay with modifiers and a “rags to riches” type of progression being presented to give players more to do if boredom ensues. Variety is highly encouraged here and should be encouraged more in normal STW. Despite external issues, Ventures is a unique experience that takes players away from the grown and weary Battle Royale/Modern Fortnite ecosystem in a good way.