Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 brings with it a lot of changes and one of them is how you install third-party products to your new simulator. The ‘Community’ folder is by far one of the most frequented destinations, especially if you add or remove a bunch of add-ons regularly. When you installed Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, you had the chance to pre-select the install location during the initial set-up, but with the new sim, this isn’t the case.
In this short little How-To, we’re going to show you where your Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 Community folder is and how to change it.
Where is the Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 Community Folder?
As mentioned before, with Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, you had the chance to pre-select the install location and this in turn would also drop the ‘Community’ folder in the same area. However, with Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, you don’t get the same ability. Instead, the default location is in your ‘Local’ folder on your system. It usually would be found in a location such as:
C:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.Limitless_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalCache\PackagesReplace [USERNAME] with your PC’s username.
To access this folder quickly, you could type in “%LOCALAPPDATA%” in your Windows file explorer. You may also need to enabled ‘Hidden Folders’.
As you can see, that is quite a location to find all of your add-ons for your ‘Community’ folder. You could add a shortcut to here, but that isn’t always ideal. It may also lead to instances where path names are too long and you encounter issues, or perhaps you want to keep your add-ons on a different drive. Therefore, you may wish to change the location.
How to Change the Location of the Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 Community Folder
There are two methods to changing your Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 Community Folder.
Method #1 (Easy)
Load up Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 and navigate to the ‘Marketplace’ menu (note: Marketplace isn’t available yet, but that doesn’t matter).
At the top, click on ‘My Library’. From there, you will see a ‘Search’ bar on the right-hand side. Next to the search bar is a cog icon – click on this. A new pop-up will appear showing you your current ‘Community’ folder location and how much storage is currently being used by the simulator.
To change the Community folder location, click on ‘Browser’ and select a new location you wish to store your ‘Community’ add-ons. In my case, I chose a different drive and simply called it ‘MSFS2024’
E:\MSFS2024Now all you need to do is click ‘Confirm’ and the new Community folder will be created.
Method #2 (Slightly Harder)
For this method, you will need to have already created the location where you want the ‘Community’ folder to appear. So for example (you don’t need to create the ‘Community’ folder:
E:\MSFS2024Now, you will want to change the ‘UserCfg.opt’ file, located in your LocalCache of the Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 package. You can find that:
C:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.Limitless_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalCache\Open the UserCfg.opt file with a text editor of your choice (Notepad works fine) and scroll to the base of the file, looking for ‘InstalledPackagesPath’. Now paste your file location path within the quotation marks and save the file.
That’s it, you’ve changed the location of your Community folder. You can confirm this by loading up the simulator and following the steps in method #1.
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We hope you find this useful in managing your add-ons a lot easier in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024. Let us know if you have any other tips below.
