Microsoft Flight Simulator has been on the market for just a few days. While most of the community is busy trying to get its act together with tweaking the sim to run on their systems (which is a whole other story at this point), there are others who have already taken the liberty to start designing new content. That’s exactly what the folks over at Drezwircki Design have done. Flight Simulator is getting freeware scenery, as Drezwircki published three new airfields for the game, all for free.
I honestly believe this is the first set of freeware scenery content for Flight Simulator— at least as far as I’ve seen. The ICAO codes are as follows:
- EPNS – Chrcynno (Nasielsk)
- EPKU – Konstancin
- EPKQ – Karczew
The three airfields are all located in Poland; not exactly the most iconic of areas. Yet, that doesn’t change the fact that they all look beautiful. Here’s a screenshot taken by patrickb1973 (over at the Flight Simulator forums) which shows off EPKU:
You can download the new scenery from the link above. They come in a single zip file called WarsawCity.zip. Just download it, extract it, and then… Wait, where do you put these files? It’s not as straightforward as titles like Flight Simulator X or X-Plane 11. But, it’s not that complicated, thankfully. The following tutorial is specifically for the Windows Store version of the sim:
Installation Guide (for any add-on)
You can simply copy this string from here and paste it into your File Explorer’s address bar:
C:\Users\[YourName]\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.FlightSimulator_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalCache\Packages Replace “[YourName]” with whatever the name of your user profile is. If you did it correctly, then you should land in a folder that looks like this:
This is where the main content data of the sim is located. That is, the various airports and scenery that come with the game. They’re in the “Official” folder. What you want is the “Community” folder. Jump into Community and simply take the extracted contents of the zip file and drop it there. It should look like this:
Once this is all done, just fire up the simulator and head on over to the world map. Type in one of the ICAO codes above into the “From” and “To” sections. It’ll automatically swing the map around to the correct location. If you installed the scenery correctly, you’ll see a gold star next to the airport icon. It’s the same star used to highlight the official “Handcrafted” airports.
After loading it up, this was the result:
Humble beginnings!
While this isn’t some incredibly grand airport, it’s still really cool that someone has already gone ahead and developed some add-ons for the fledgling simulator. Indeed, this is only the beginning of what is sure to be an incoming torrent of custom sceneries, aircraft, and other add-on content.
[Source]
