In TFE2, citizens can walk, fly with small Spaceships, take the elevator, ride the train or use a teleporter (or two teleporters, to be more precise).
Each of these means of transport has its own speed, which I will specify here in the order of their speed and in units of time within the game and in real time if you play normal speed.

Walking: 10 minutes per block (0.5 seconds real time)

Flying with the Space Ship: 1.5× as fast as walking and so slower than anything else (6⅔ minutes or ⅓ second real time) and it may have to fly around obstacles.

Taking the Train: Twice as fast as walking (5 minutes or ¼ second, so faster than the Spaceship but you might have to wait for the train and the train might stop at other stations.

Taking the High Speed Rail Train: As fast as the elevator but you might have to wait for the train and the train might stop at other stations.

Taking the Hyper Elevator: 10 times as fast as walking, so 1 minute per block (0.05 seconds).

Using (two) Teleporters: Instantly. However, entering and exiting the teleporter takes the same 10 minutes as any other one-block movement on foot. Each. Of course, this is something that must be taken into account for all these means of transport.

You get Space Ships pretty early on and they are cheap. However, they only connect spatially separated building complexes really well. They are not particularly suitable for moving through a complex, as the tunnels provided for this take up an enormous amount of space and are expensive.

Quite often, they have to fly around obstacles, increasing their way and travel time.

For the reasons mentioned above, I have gotten into the habit of running a grid of hyper elevators through all my building complexes, which I distribute initially so that every block can be reached from an elevator in no more than six steps / 1 hour (or vice versa).


Elevators are unlocked when the city has at least 200 inhabitants and has at least one Refined Metals Factory.
Each hyper elevator can reach any other hyper elevator that is above or below it and that it is connected to in an unbroken, vertical line of buildings of any type (except rooftop buildings).



It is common practice to place elevator columns in the middle of buildings or – even worse – on their edges. In the picture below I show why this makes less sense in the situation described at the beginning, when the materials are not yet available in any quantity and each building construction still has to be carefully considered.


I only use a third of the elevators on the left that I use on the right. The colored markings show how many blocks away the elevator is. The selected sections are the same size and representative of their buildings.


Although there is a house on the left that is 6 blocks from the elevator, while none on the right are less than 5 blocks away, on average the residents on the left are more than 3% faster. And this is despite the fact that I use 66.67% fewer elevators here, meaning 6.67% more people can live here.

If I then later increase the number of elevators in my grid, the difference becomes even more significant.

So our workers can now get to the street quickly and also back up from the street quickly – whether at home or at work. But how do they get from one elevator shaft to another quickly? The train offers a neat solution here. Build a station at the same height (not necessarily on the ground) adjacent to each elevator. This connects the elevator shafts of a complex to each other. But you still can't get from one complex to the next.
So Spaceships again?

That's certainly not a bad idea at the beginning: put a landing platform on top of each elevator shaft. Or plan wisely and forward-looking and build your landing pads from the outset at places where you later want to place your elevator shafts.

As soon as you have enough computer chips, however, you should use them to build teleporters. Until then, you can pass the time by installing the 6×6 grid described above in all of your complexes.

Since a teleporter loses a lot of its efficiency if the citizen has to walk ten blocks (100 minutes) to reach it, we place the first one adjacent to an elevator (because the elevators are already well connected) on the ground in a residential building. Not on the roof, because you already have Spaceships there and that way you distribute the traffic a little. In addition, you usually continue to build the building upwards and if you start with the teleporters at the bottom, it will be easier to tighten the mesh of the transport grid later.

We also place the second teleporter on the ground but in a production complex (e.g. farms or refined metal – these will be the ones you need most urgently at this point) and adjacent to an elevator.

The more computer chips you produce, the more teleporters you can build. Gradually build one at the bottom of each elevator shaft.

In order to produce computer chips, you will now also produce a decent amount of refined metal, which makes the elevators seem much cheaper than they were a short time ago.

That's why you can now gradually double the number of elevators by placing another elevator in the middle between two others in either each shaft or on each level. Both have the same effect.
The costs differ, however:

If you have built more in width than in height up to this point, it is cheaper to increase the number of elevators per shaft.

However, if you build a tower or skyscraper upwards, it is cheaper to add more elevator shafts with the same floor spacing.

If you have enough materials for this, you can do both. In the end, the grid should be 3×3 anyway – at least in residential buildings. This does not always work in production buildings, as they often need very specific neighborhood patterns to work optimally. Too many elevators are counterproductive here. (I will also write a guide on neighborhood patterns)

By now your CC production should be running smoothly. So you can start to gradually increase the number of your teleporters. You don't have to wait until step 5 is completed. Whenever you have CCs left, build a few more teleporters.

I usually put a teleporter next to each elevator every 24 floors. If you still have a 6-grid vertically, that would be on every 4th elevator; if you have already increased the number to a 3-grid vertically, that would be on every 8th elevator.


In the end it could look something like this picture. The farm / laboratory tower shows that a 4×4 grid is also possible. The Spaceships are no longer needed now, by the way. So they can be replaced by nicer rooftop-only buildings. 😉

• Not only should living and working areas have quick access. Schools and entertainment must also be well connected:
- Schools, because children learn more and move into working life with a better education, which increases their work efficiency.
- Entertainment districts, because otherwise citizens take too long to reach them, so they stay there all night and go from there to work, where they then arrive very late because there are no trains in Disco Town.

• When building (many) teleporters, the maintenance costs should always be taken into account. If you want to be able to switch off the teleporters from time to time to save knowledge, it is all the more important that they are only part of an otherwise free transport network made up of elevators, UFOs and possibly rail connections.

• If you only want to rely on teleporters at a much more advanced stage of the game, pay attention to how far the walking routes are to reach the teleporters.


• A commute time of 100 and below is good, 80 is very good, and 60 and below is great. In large cities (population 6,000 or more) it will usually not be possible to get below 40 consistently.

• I hope you enjoyed this guide and that it wasn't too long. I decided to include a few things that are actually self-evident, because it should also be suitable for complete beginners.