How to get faster into the main menu (for repainting)

Hello and a nice weekend,

is there any way to get into the main menu faster when doing aircraft and cockpit repaints?
It´s almost maddening sometimes waiting for 20 minutes (!!!) just to see for example if the instrument panel and the throttle quadrant match in colour - exit the sim, do some minor changes im Photoshop and Gimp - launch the sim again and again wait 10-20 minutes until finally getting into the main menu to see the live texture inside the hangar.
Please is there ANY way to get into the main menu faster?

Thanks in advance and have a great weekend :slight_smile:

Empty your Community folder and only keep the stuff in it that you need for repainting the aircraft. That will keep loading times low. Also you can create a batch file in order to quick-start MSFS (i.e. skip the videos)

  1. open a normal txt file in the editor
  2. copy the following line into it:
    start “” C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /C start shell:AppsFolder\Microsoft.FlightSimulator_8wekyb3d8bbwe!App “-FastLaunch”
  3. save the file
  4. rename it to “Flight Simulator Quickstart.bat”
  5. start MSFS with that

Also you don’t have to go back to the main menu or restart the sim in order to reload changes in the plane’s livery.
Simply keep Dev mode activated and load ANOTHER plane (not another livery!), wait till it appears. Repeat 5-10 times. Sooner or later the plane you’re repainting and thus the livery will be thrown from memory and you can load the plane again and view the changes you’ve made to the livery. This works both in the sim as well as in the “Hangar”.
This obviously will not work in case you add files to your livery. Those will only be active when you restart MSFS.

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Thanks I will try it out! This is very annoying today, sometimes I have to wait 10-20 minutes to get into the main menu, and sometimes loading the flight takes half an hour.

Pfff…

I try switching off online functionality now - perhaps this might help, and if this does not help I do your method :slight_smile:

Wow. The longest I have to wait is about 3 minutes with all addons and 2 minutes without.

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What are your PC specs?

My loading times are 3 minutes. And I thought that was too much!

Then another minute or less to load a flight.

I play on an Alienware attached to an 85-inch TV, controlled with an Xbox latest controller.

I’m sure the main developers would even scour the official folder

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Mine loaded to main menu in 2m52s with a 3.7Gb Community folder.
32Gb DDR4-3600
Ryzen 7 3700X
Installation on SSD

What’s your RAM speed and how much is in use? In menu with browser and some game launchers running I’m seeing 14.1Gb used of 32Gb.

I used a tool called “CPU-Z” to confirm my ram speed and task manager to check the usage.

10 to 20 minutes is really long, my middle-class system needs 3-5 min (depending on community folder). I would start debugging at the SSD performance. NVMe attached brand SSD on M.2 Slot supporting at least PCIe 3 (or even 4) that uses all lanes? Not competing for resources?

E.g. my mainboard has a subtle defect/feature that makes it use less lanes when two M.2 SSDs are attached.

Hopefully, I only use the scenery editor but suffer as well as the long booting time when you want for example to check your final build out of the dev mode. Because Blender objects are hopefully reloaded in realtime and no need to restart the sim.

Emptying my community folder when “developping” is a mandatory step. I’m almost ready to consider emptying some Official/OneStore but don’t know by which to start with.