MSFS 2024 litters onto your C: drive!

[coobikful]

MSFS 2024 tries to put everything to your C: drive right from the beginning!
Under "C:\Users\USER\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024"

It could be a lot! You are risking to face "No space left of device" problem!
MSFS 2020 lets you select the path where to put the resources (Community and Official packages) and cache at the very beginning which is good. But MSFS 2024 does not allow that!

DEVS please make the path to resources and cache dirs customizable right at the first setup!
C: drive is dedicated to the system and must not be polluted!

UPD

MSFS 2024 downloads all the stuff to:
"C:\Users\USER\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024\StreamedPackages"
and looks like there is no way to change that!
It must be the configurable library path at least.

DEVs please stop loading data on the fly to the C: drive!

[Doctor Hades]

I found that the MS Flight Sim 2020 was storing over 65 GB of data in a hidden folder on my C: drive until I deleted it.

I get that these games need to cache data, and a lot of it, but there should be an option to use the game install location rather than it defaulting to the C drive, which I'd wager is often the smallest drive on many people's PCs. Microsoft are just creating problems by using this drive, particularly as using hidden folders means that it is near impossible for most users to know why their C: drive has suddenly lost a huge chunk of storage space.

I was often seeing the drive showing low space warnings on mine (and showing in red in File Explorer), although it is now fine since I deleted the 65 GB of cached data for MS Flight Sim 2020!

[coobikful]

you can change the rolling cache location in settings in 2020 and 2024 later, but that is not that obvious. + it does not delete the old cache file (ROLLINGCACHE.CCC) after moving to a new one.

as for the library dir, it appears that you can change it later from marketplace/library settings. right now the library dir is empty, all the packages are set to "streaming" (i could not change that) - they are downloaded into the cache. looks like there no way to download the packages permanently.

also not all my 2020 purchases have made it into 2024. AN-225 is missing, for instance. Some of the airports from 2020 appear in the library, but do not show up in the world.

UPD

MSFS 2024 downloads all the stuff to:
"C:\Users\USER\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024\StreamedPackages"
and looks like there is no way to change that!

[Firaga]

You can change the streaming data location to a different drive using symlink. Obviously a bit gimmicky to need such a trick. However, this worked at least for me:

Move (cut and paste) the whole Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 AppData from C drive to the desired location.

Open cmd as administrator and give the following command:

mklink /j “C:\Users\<your_username>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024” “M:\Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 Cache” or whichever location you copied the cache to

Further instructions can be found from google.

ps. Still in favor of enabling this natively via FS2024 client.

[Hootman]

Been like that since 2020. I still don't think I ever discovered ALL the places it infects.

I have a separate SSD drive I load all my Steam game on, but yep, it seems there will always be some games that sort of "demand" to be on the C drive, mostly in the "Saved Games" or "user" folders.

I keep an eye on it and sometimes make the effort to move things, since I have 18TB total on 4 mobo mounted and 2 external SSD's, and my goal when I built this new gaming PC a year ago was to try to keep my C drive with basically nothing but windows on it. Overall, I've accomplished that goal, but between Onedrive and games like FS2020 / FS2024, that C drive slowly builds.