Frozen Lakes workarounds?

I’m trying to recreate some local winter scenes (Minnesota), and the lack of frozen lakes here is just a major immersion problem.

I understand frozen lakes only happen in live weather, and they unfreeze when you mess with weather.

Is it possible there are any workarounds or manual methods to force lakes to be frozen, while otherwise messing with weather? Something hiding in dev mode? Editing a config file somewhere? 3rd party… something? I’d be content if there was something I could just make “all water frozen”, not looking for granular settings.

Flying around these unfrozen lakes in otherwise sub-zero/wintery conditions is just agony!

msfs-2024

Hi @Rainbow631 ,

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I am not aware of a workaround but here are some related topics:
Lake Ice Should Not Be Linked to Snow Depth in North-America
Lakes should be frozen/white in winter

The topic mentionned by @DementedCorn327 is right on. However, is it categorised in the wishlist which needs several hundred votes to be considered while this issue is not a noew goodie to include in FS but a bad and even degrated representation of the world since winter 2024 (read the thread), so should be in the bug category.

As a temporary solution, you can make a polygon with snow material, exclude vegetation and rocks (FS2024) to cover the lake contours and another one to exclude water. It is not perfect as I got a dark line passing through the lake (CSP8), which may be a cell border.