How to hire characters or recruit defeated henchmen in Fortnite Chapter 5, season 4

If you want to progress through as much of the Fortnite battle pass as possible, finishing your weekly quests is a must. This can be tough to do if you’re stumped by a particularly tricky task, like hiring characters or recruiting defeated henchmen.

This quest is quite easy to finish once you know which characters you’re looking for and how to rally them to fight alongside you. Here’s how to hire characters or recruit defeated henchmen in Fortnite.

Hire characters or recruit defeated henchmen in Fortnite

To hire characters or recruit defeated henchmen in Fortnite, you need to perform either action a total of five times. You can mix and match between both options or solely choose one of the two. The process for completing this quest looks slightly different depending on which option you choose.

How to hire characters in Fortnite

To hire a character in Fortnite, you need to track down one of the hireable NPC locations on the map and spend gold bars to recruit them. There are always lots of NPCs you can buy items from, but there are generally few you can hire to fight alongside you, which means you need to act quickly if you want to hire an ally for this quest.

If you’re not sure which NPCs are available for hire, you can check by opening the Quests page, selecting Collections in the top left corner, and navigating to the Characters tab. On this page, look for a small icon near the bottom right corner of the character portraits to determine which NPCs you can hire. Different hireable NPCs have different icons to reflect their various specialties, but all hireable recruits have some sort of icon in the bottom right corner of their portrait.

How to recruit defeated henchmen in Fortnite

At time of writing, you can’t recruit henchmen in Fortnite. This feature was available when Chapter Five, season four first launched on Aug. 16, but was disabled later on the same day and has not been re-enabled since.

Because of this issue, you can currently only finish this quest by hiring five NPCs from around the map. If the ability to covert henchmen is re-enabled, we’ll provide an update here.

When this ability was working, all you needed to do to convert a henchman was damage them until they fell. Once they were on the ground, you could then approach and interact with them to grant them a second chance. They’d fight alongside you in battle just like a regular hireable NPC after this.

Since this task takes time to complete, it’s a good idea to work on progressing through other quests at the same time. Some quests that make sense to work on alongside this one are collecting a control chip by hitting a headshot on Doom’s henchmen, eliminating opponents from over 30 meters, and damaging opponents with Doctor Doom’s Arcane Gauntlets Mystical Bomb.