Forza Horizon 5: Free fast travel (how to unlock)

Fast travel in open-world games is pretty typical, but in Forza Horizon 5, it’s surprisingly limited. When you first start playing, you can fast-travel, for free, to a single house that you own, but fast-traveling to any other house or festival hotspot is gonna cost you thousands of credits each time. Not ideal.

There is a way around this, but it’s gonna require some upfront scratch and an hour or two of tooling around the map hunting billboards. That may seem like a lot of work, but trust me when I say it’s totally worth it.

The first thing you’ll want to do is save up at least 2 million credits. This may seem like a lot, but thanks to Wheelspins and events (and so long as you’re not buying every McLaren in the shop), you’ll soon find yourself drowning in cash.

With 2 million credits in hand, you’ll want to buy the Buenas Vistas house on Mexico’s western coastline (just north of the hotel). If you’re not seeing it on your map, you may need to complete the first Street Racing expedition in the main campaign, Guanajuato. Once that’s done, Buenas Vistas should be purchasable.

Buying Buenas Vistas unlocks the ability to fast-travel to any point on any road in all of Forza Horizon 5. This is tremendously useful for getting around quickly, but it doesn’t solve the other problem: It’s still costing you thousands of credits each time you fast travel. Let’s fix that, shall we?

Throughout Forza Horizon 5’s map, there are fast travel billboards. If you get close enough, they’ll appear on your radar as small lightning bolts. There are 50 of these in total, and each one you destroy will knock down the price of fast travel by 200 credits. Hit them all, and all of your fast travel will be free!

Image: Playground Games/Xbox Game Studios via Polygon

In terms of tracking them all down, you can fork out $2.99 in a real-money microtransaction for Forza Horizon 5’s Treasure Map (:eyeroll:), which will make all 50 boards appear on your map. The better option: Open up this free interactive map and type “fast travel” into the search box, and it’ll give you all the locations you need. Your in-game radar will gray out the ones you’ve already broken, so you can focus only on the new ones.

Going in a lazy circle around the map, I was able to knock out all the fast travel boards in an hour or two. (There are only two tricky ones, located on top of buildings, but this video should help you nab those.) Toss on a podcast and pick your favorite offroad vehicle, and you’ll have it done before you know it.

Since doing that, holy cow, Forza Horizon 5 is a totally different game for me. I love doing batches of similar events one after the other. Previously, doing all of the Danger Sign jumps would have required a ton of driving (or a ton of money to fast-travel to each one). Now, I’m able to pop around from point to point instantly with my ideal car built for long jumps, and knock them all out in a flash. It doesn’t hurt that, on the Xbox Series X, it takes, like, three seconds to load to a new location anywhere on the map.

Moral of the story: While it may seem like homework, nab all those fast travel boards in Forza Horizon 5. Your future self will thank you for it.