There must be a new Flight Simulator in town, because a shiny new add-on website to host freeware content is already on the scene. Indeed, less than a week since its release, the talent within the flight sim community has already risen up to produce some new content for Microsoft Flight Simulator.
Finally, some Flight Simulator freeware
Aptly named MSFSAddons.org, the new website is hosting various add-ons and plugins already, all for free.
As you might expect, it’s a bit bare of content as of now, but there is sure to be far more additions as the weeks and months go on. A few highlights are as follows:
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Airport — Swisse Alps, Münster, Switzerland (LSPU)
Elijah Hoyne has taken a crack at modifying a small airport in Switzerland with some new textures to better represent how it looks compared to its real-life counterpart. Click here to download, and have fun bush flying through the beautiful Swiss Alps.
Scenery — Anchorage, Alaska gets a water fix
Microsoft Flight Simulator is powered by the beautiful satellite imagery from Bing Maps. For the most part, it looks absolutely gorgeous. But, when you try to render the entire planet Earth in 3D at once, there’s bound to be some hits and misses. That’s what this patch by Reddit user “baddweapon” seeks to address. It fixes 50 bodies of water around the natural beauty that is Anchorage, Alaska. Some of the issues address weird oddities like lakes and rivers being unnaturally raised. Once you download it, you’ll be able to fly around and enjoy the scenery as it was intended to look.
Plugin — Spacedesk
If you don’t have a multi-monitor setup and want a little more screen real estate to house an extra Flight Simulator window, SpaceDesk is here to help out. If you own an Android tablet or an iPad, you can fire up the app and integrate it with the sim to provide an additional display to throw an additional panel onto. For example, the above image shows Reddit user “Blue” going for a quick VFR flight. To keep his map in view, he used SpaceDesk to take Flight Simulator’s pop-out map and display it on an iPad Mini. You can grab SpaceDesk here.
Airplane – DR400-140B Dauphin
Of course, what would this list of flight sim freeware be without an actual plane? The apparent first-ever freeware aircraft for Microsoft Flight Simulator is a tweaked modification of the DR400-140B, created by Dranbar. While this plane is included in the sim, this particular model has a few changes made tot the engine, prop, and also the mass and balance. While we still have yet to see a full new modeled plane (for example, the Boeing 737), this is still a start! Take it for a test flight.
Where do all these files for Flight Simulator go?
Now that you’ve downloaded these files, it would be nice to know where to send them to. Finding the data folder for MSFS can be a hit of a head scratcher, but we’ve done the hard work for you. Simply copy and paste the following string to your address bar in File Explorer to be taken directly there.
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:
Simply drag and drop every add-on folder into the “Community” folder. Fire up the sim, and everything should be good to go.
Please note that if the location of your MSFS data folder is different, you can watch the video below to find out where your specific data folder is.
