Playing TFT on Two Macs: What Travels With You and What Does Not

A Mac at the office and another at home, or a laptop for travel and a desktop for the evening queue. The questions always arrive in the same order: do I keep my rank, do I have to reinstall everything, and does this count as two. The answer sits on one dividing line worth settling once and for all: everything that makes up your TFT game lives on the Riot account, and everything that makes it comfortable lives on the machine.

What follows the Riot account, so there is nothing to transfer

TFT progress is not stored anywhere on your drive. It lives on Riot servers, attached to the account, and that is what makes the second Mac painless: you sign in, and it is already there.

• Rank and LP. One ladder, one queue, whatever device happens to be drawing the board. The full scale is in our article on ranks and the ladder.
• The collection. Tacticians, arenas, booms and emotes stay selectable on both sides, with nothing to copy across.
• The current pass and its missions. One progress bar, not two halves to glue back together.
• Purchases and in-game currency, the friends list and match history.
• The region. It belongs to the account and not to where you sign in from: opening the game at a different desk does not move you to another server.

In other words there is no transfer to request, no save file to export and no code to retype between machines. It is the same principle as cross-progression between phone and desktop, covered in full in our article on the Riot account.

What stays on the machine, and has to be set up again

The second Mac inherits nothing from the first. None of it touches your progress, but it is what creates the feeling of starting from scratch the first time you open the game there.

• Keybinds. Your buy, reroll and sell keys are a local setting: two minutes to redo, and our keyboard guide gives a layout worth reproducing exactly.
• Allocated memory and cores, plus the resolution. These are machine settings, and that is a good thing: a MacBook Air and a desktop Mac do not want the same numbers.
• The Google account used by the Play Store. It is the identity that installs the game, distinct from the Riot account that plays it, and it is asked for again on every new machine.
• The game itself, to download again. Leave room for it: roughly ten gigabytes all in, broken down in our article on how much disk space it takes.
• The Riot session. You sign in once on the second Mac, exactly as you would on a new phone.

Telling those identities apart, the Google account that installs, the Riot account that plays and the key that unlocks the machine, settles half the confusion around this question. Our article on running two accounts covers it end to end.

A game in progress does not travel

This is the one thing the account cannot catch for you. Leaving a game to catch a train does not pause it: your board stays in the lobby, frozen on its last placement, and keeps fighting and losing health until it is eliminated. What that actually costs is detailed in our article on leaving a game early.

Two practical consequences. An account can only be in one game at a time, so the two Macs will never be running two lobbies at once. And when the day is cut in half, a short queue before you leave beats a ranked game started in a hurry: Hyper Roll fits in about fifteen minutes, as our article on the mode explains.

The licence: one active Mac at a time

On the game side nothing limits the number of machines. On the launcher side something does: one key unlocks one active Mac at a time. That is an anti-sharing measure rather than per-device billing, and the switch is driven from your account page.

• The account page shows the active Mac and carries a button that releases it. Once the slot is free, the same key activates on the other machine.
• Enter the key on a second Mac without releasing the first and the refusal is spelled out rather than silent: the licence is already active elsewhere.
• There is no second subscription to buy for a second Mac, but the back and forth is not automatic: every switch needs that click.
• For genuinely daily use on both sides, that gesture gets old quickly. It is the honest limit of this setup, and better known before than after.

What the licence never touches is the Riot account. Releasing a Mac, cancelling or reinstalling has no effect on rank, collection or purchases, as our article on cancelling sets out in detail.

Two different Macs: which one does what

The second machine is rarely a twin of the first, and that is where the split becomes interesting. A turn-based game asks for no horsepower: the gap between your two Macs is about the screen and the fan, not the chip. A desktop shows the board, the bench and the shop in one glance and holds three games back to back without heating up, where a thin laptop eventually throttles. The full sorting is in our article on the desktop Mac, and the same question for laptops in the one on the MacBook Pro.

One setting deserves to be redone per machine rather than copied: the resolution. It is the only parameter that can make a laptop heat up for nothing, and the right number on a large desktop display is not the right number on thirteen inches.

On both Macs, the Riot client no longer launches

One thing to know before installing anything on the second machine: since patch 18.1, the one that opened Set 18 by moving TFT from Riot in-house engine to Unreal Engine, macOS is no longer supported. No support, no fixes, and that applies to both Macs at once. Riot describes the removal as temporary and says it is working to support the system in a future update, with no date announced. The same patch also dropped older, lower-memory Android and iOS devices. No account was reset or deleted, which is consistent with everything above: progress was never inside the application. The full context is in our article on macOS support being removed.

Android is still supported, and that is how the game keeps running on an Apple Silicon Mac: the official Android client, on keyboard and full screen, with the same Riot account on both sides. Setting up the second machine follows exactly the same path as the first, step by step in our install tutorial.

Two Macs, in five lines

• Rank, LP, collection, pass, purchases, friends and region follow the Riot account: nothing to transfer, nothing to export.
• Keybinds, allocated memory, resolution, Google account and the installed game stay on the machine: set them up once on the second one.
• A game in progress does not pause: the board plays on without you, and an account can only be in one lobby at a time.
• The licence covers one active Mac at a time, with a release button on the account page: no second subscription, but one click per switch.
• Since patch 18.1 TFT no longer supports macOS, on both machines: the game continues through the Android client.