The latest Microsoft Flight Simulator release still doesn’t have official liveries through the in-game store. Even if it did, we doubt they’d be free with single airports currently going for $15 to $20. Thankfully, the flight simulation community is dedicated to providing all types of mods and filling in holes that players find lacking. One of those is the aforementioned liveries. Some modders have put together giant livery megapacks while others have released smaller individual liveries for their favorite planes.
While there are plenty of guides telling you how to install liveries, there aren’t many which help you address any bugs that may be popping up as a result. In this guide, we’re going to explain how to install liveries and address some of the most common bugs including liveries not showing up in game and what to do if your computer won’t let you add files to your community folder.
How to Install Liveries
There are multiple ways to figure out where you need to install your liveries and other mods. You’re looking for a specific community folder located somewhere in your game files. Some guides will have you use the Run command and open your AppData folder, others will have you just explore through your game files. But the best way we’ve found to be 100 percent certain where we need to be is through the game itself.
To really see which folders the game is monitoring, you need to turn on developer mode. You can do so by going to Options > General > Developers. Once it’s turned on, you’ll see a small black bar appear at the top of your screen with drop downs for Tools, Camera, Options, etc. Click on Tools and then Virtual File System. This will pop up another menu which can be a bit intimidating, but just click on Watched Bases. This will show you the files that the game is monitoring. One of them should explicitly mention “Community” in it. This is where you want to put your mods including liveries.
Of course, you’ll need to go back to a file browser and manually navigate over to your community folder, but that shouldn’t be too hard now that you know the path to get there.
Once you’ve opened that folder, simply drag all of your livery folders into there!
How to Get Liveries In Game
To actually activate the liveries in the game you may need to view them in your hanger first. Go to My Profile > Hanger and select a plane. Click change livery and you should see all of the liveries you just installed show up. You may need to do this for each individual plane. Keep in mind that you usually need to restart the game if you installed the liveries while Microsoft Flight Simulator was running.
Not All Liveries Are Showing Up
If you’re missing some liveries like the plethora of A320 skins, you may need to delete and reimport the files into the Community folder. We had an issue were not all of our skins were showing up and it required us to remove all files from the Community folder and then re-add them.
Organization Doesn’t Let You Place Files Here Bug
This was honestly the peskiest bug we had when trying to get liveries to work. Simply put, Windows wasn’t allowing us to add any new files to this location. Instead we were greeted with a message saying, “Your organization doesn’t allow you to place files here.” We tried everything. We made sure we had the right permissions, the folder wasn’t private, we were in admin mode.
The solution was one we actually found on a forum related to Minecraft users on the Windows Store complaining of the same issue. The solution? The game wasn’t located on the same drive as Windows. Once we moved our installation of Flight Simulator over to our SSD with Windows, the system allowed us to add and access those files as much as we wanted to.
You don’t have to uninstall and reinstall the game, by the way! Just go over to your Add or Remove Programs page, find Flight Simulator, and click the Move button.
If you encounter any other issues with liveries, let us know!
