Fortnite vaults Icy Grappler after players discover game-crashing hyperspeed movement

Fortnite took the Icy Grappler out of Fortnite after players began abusing it to slingshot themselves around the map.

Fortnite’s Winterfest update brought daily gifts and holiday-themed updates around the map. This included the Icy Grappler, a take on the original Grappler released in Chapter 1 Season 5.

Unlike the Grappler, the Icy Grappler puts ice on the player’s feet, giving them an added movement speed boost. Combined with the ability to propel themselves towards surfaces, this made for unpredictably fast movement.

But that wasn’t enough for players, who soon realized that the movement speed could be increased even further when sprinting was added to the equation. While increased movement speed was the intention with the Icy Grappler, the speeds players could achieve were not quite what the developers had in mind.

Fortnite thaws out Icy Grappler due to movement exploit

A clip on Reddit surfaced shortly after the Icy Grappler was introduced to the game. The clip shows the player being able to launch themselves at inhuman speeds while sprinting using the Icy Grappler.

“That’s insane,” said one commenter. “This is the closest I’ll get to a speed mythic. Hopefully they don’t patch it before I can try it myself.”

After seeing the movement exploit, Fortnite opted to remove the Icy Grappler from the game. According to the original post, not only was the Icy Grappler causing players to move faster than intended, but it was also crashing matches.

“More grappling news,” said Fortnite. “We’ve thawed out and unvaulted the regular Grappler to take the place of the recently vaulted Icy Grappler for the remainder of Winterfest!”

The Grappler was reintroduced to Fortnite during Season OG and has now returned for the short duration of Winterfest. While fans won’t be able to slingshot around the map, they can enjoy the Grappler until it leaves on January 2.