There has been a noticeable amount of confusion in the main Microsoft Flight Simulator forums regarding how Community folders actually work across MSFS 2020 and MSFS 2024.
The behavior is not documented in detail anywhere official, and users are often left to infer how the system operates. This has led to conflicting statements, misunderstandings about folder precedence, problems caused by redirected installations, and issues with third-party installers placing add-ons in unexpected locations.
Since the SDK community is the best place for technical clarification, I’ve put together my own detailed analysis outlining how the Community, Community2024, redirected folders, and virtual merge behavior “appears” to function in MSFS 2020 and MSFS 2024.
The document also highlights several challenges that arise in dual-sim installations and offers recommendations for third-party tool authors.
The goal is simply to verify whether this analysis is accurate and, if so, to suggest that the information might be worth incorporating into SDK documentation to reduce future confusion.
The PDF is here:
MSFS Community Folder Architecture — Technical Analysis
Feedback, corrections, and additions from the SDK community are welcome.
Thank you for the initiative.
I’ll add something to our backlog so that the SDK documentation can be improved on this.
Adding that the main reason the Community2024 folder was introduced is so that people can point to a common Packages directory for both MSFS 2020 and MSFS 2024, instead of duplicating MSFS 2020 packages they want to have in both sims.
Given that the two folder structures are - (updated 12/12/25)
**
MSFS 2020 uses:**
Packages/
Official ← MSFS2020’s built-in content
Community ← MSFS2020’s add-ons
MSFS 2024 uses:
Packages/
Official ← MSFS2024’s built-in content Official2024 ← MSFS2024’s built-in content (Update)
Community ← Legacy add-ons (2020-style)
Community2024 ← NEW add-ons built for 2024
Content gets put into the OFFICIAL or OFFICIAL2020 folders by the Sim, so their correct placements are secured.
But content put into the Community folders, are subject to both Developer installers, and users manually putting them there, so issues can occur, if say, a packet that is formatted and structured for one sim, in placed in the other sims Community folder.
The question then is, does MSFS2024 take care of this, or does it have issues in the incorrectly targeted addon is placed in an incorrect community folder ?
How does this reconcile with the last line in UserCfg.opt? That should be the authoritative pointer towards that particular sim install 's Packages Path?