Install Size is Getting Out of Hand

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I’ll cut to the chase here:

On my Xbox, Microsoft Flight Simulator currently has an installation size of 271,9 GB. The base game is 187,7 GB while the “reserved space” is 84,2 GB.

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I have all World Updates installed, which, according to my content manager, take up 47,01 GB in all. Other than that, the only third-party add-ons I have is the HondaJet, the Halo Pelican and a few livery packs, which take up around 1,3 GB in all, at the most. My rolling cache (which, I would assume, is part of the “reserved space”) is set to 16 GB and I reset it after every update.

Now, even if I chose to uninstall every World Update, my simulator would still take up 224,89 GB. I also noticed that the “reserved space” slowly but surely grows over time. A few weeks or months ago it was at around the 77 GB mark. We’re talking about so many gigabytes that could even house complete games, and that’s just the reserved space! What, in a year it’s going to be 100+ GB in itself?

I think this is getting out of hand at this point. Firstly, I wish the World Updates could be partially uninstalled. The only thing I’d really keep is the handcrafted airports – I don’t need the discovery flights, the landing challenges or even the points of interest, even though they truly are beautiful. But more importantly, I feel the simulator just grows and eats up my SSD over time. It’s nice that the developers push content out like a conveyor belt but this pace is unsustainable. Just think of the Xbox Series S users who barely have 300-400 GB free space on their console. We will slowly reach a point where Flight Simulator will simply not fit on it. And this is before any more games are installed at all.

Now, I don’t really know what the long term plan is here. The sim takes up roughly double of what it did when it was released on Xbox about a year ago. I mean, this growth cannot be sustained for years and years to come. And I haven’t even purchased many add-ons yet, what if I started doing that? I wonder if the developers are aware of this and make optimizations in this field as well.

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Time to buy another SSD or… a computer maybe? Drives exist to be filled, my friend. On a computer you can add nearly endless drives. No idea about consoles. Might be limited. :wink:

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You can partially uninstall world updates. I don’t have any bush flights or landing challenges. Make sure you’re selecting the itemised list (the right-hand option of the two) when looking through your installed items.

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Personal Comments:

I understand your concerns, my friend. But… this is the nature of the beast. I remember many years ago with my 24k baud modem taking hours to download just a couple MBs. And now I am downloading and storing GBs in nearly no time at all. Technology marches on. The insatiable thirst of simulator (and gaming) enthusiasts drives content and capabilities, and developers work to make their products as full-featured and authentic as technology allows.

I know you can expand Xbox storage, so that will help you keep MSFS on your console as the title expands. I also understand and appreciate the desire to pick and choose content to install. You can do that now via the Content Manager. Bottom line, the title will continue to grow and expand. The community demands it. My guess is you’ll find a happy medium along the way and continue to enjoy MSFS.

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Yeah, it is big compared to games from maybe 5 years ago I guess but what can we expect when we have a low level photo of almost the entire planet.

300gb is still a less than half the size of my old x-plane install that just had a few high quality regions that even then weren’t that VFR friendly compared to MSFS.

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Ah so it has the same size as the old Flight Simulator X installation, but back in these days harddisks were ridiculous and nowadays 100 or even 300 gigabytes are not much :slight_smile:
There are already 8 Terabyte drives to plug in. But not being able to put the community folder in one of these external drives might become a problem.

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The aerial/satellite imagery textures are getting streamed off the internet and are not being stored locally, unless you use the rolling cache.

I’m currently at 341 GB btw, thanks to all the add-ons. :wink:

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The nature of the beast it is. Does anyone remember 16gb storage on phones was enough? Even those apps are getting bloated. At least the world updates get used.

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I remember my first PC with a 500 MB (yes MB, not GB) hard drive and 8 MB of RAM (yes MB, not GB). :smiley:

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I guess a good clean up process is, using the content manager, uninstall everything that you can uninstall. Leaving only the mandatory content that you can’t remove. Make sure you’re online and let it sync with your online account.

then uninstall the entire game, make sure that’s it’s really cleared and the storage space is reclaimed.

Then install MSFS again, at this point, it should be installed with the miminum size requirement without any of the junk legacy files still attached. And that would be your most compact installation size.

Then when you come back to the Content manager, you don’t need to install everything. Just install the one you need for your most common upcoming flights, and remove the ones you don’t need. That’s what I do, I have all the world updates claimed, but I never install them. I only open the package, and install the airport that I want to fly out of / in to, then once I’m done, I remove them again. That way I keep my installation as compact and as light as possible.

Things like landing challenges, other activities, and other aircraft are a lot of the stuff that I don’t need. So I keep them out.

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Soon 500 gigabytes of HIGHEST QUALITY terrain mesh with 100 new bespoken airports will be added, and this will make every NAND cell of your NVMe with electric load for the binary 1 and 0 code scream for mercy. :smiley:
There is only one device helping your NVMe survive endure all this in the summer heat:

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Personal Comments

Assertive pruning of Content is key - I don’t install: Bush Trips, Landing Challenges, aircraft that I will never fly (understanding that the base game which everyone has entitlement to has a/c you cannot remove), and even certain handcrafted airports that are just disk hogs that I won’t frequent. Top Gun as a DLC - didn’t install it.

Same thing goes for the Community folder - since you can’t exempt it from being co-located on the same logical partition as your Official Packages folder. There are work-arounds like Add-On Linkers and such, but my installation of mods is very lean compared to others, making such tools really more of a hassle than useful.

The objective is to keep the total Packages sizes smaller than the base game install - which is a 115 GB or so. If you’re like me and operating at around 70-80 GB for the Packages total, you’re doing just fine.

The reality though is with a ten year project - there’s only more content coming, not less. At some point, the devs will have to consider an overall strategy to reduce the footprint - but that already has unintended effects - take for example assets that the devs assumed everyone would install (bundled inside one of the airports) to reuse elsewhere in the sim, but then some folks didn’t install said airfield - resulting in graphical glitches. There’s a limit to how you can optimize disk consumption. At some point, you have to pay the piper in hard space.

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when i first installed the game took up just over 120gb (medium version)
2 years later its taking up 190gb (with all the updates installed)

if we extrapolate from that we would end up with 280gb More so 470gb in total
in the 10 years (around 8 years left) they promised to continue development

while that is Huge its not completely off the charts ‘so to speak’
DCS World can be over 250gb, so can Ark Survival with a few extra maps and addons

im not really weighing in on the ‘good vs bad’ here, just saying it is what it is.
for us pc gamers its easy to say “well just buy a bigger drive”
for xbox i think they will need to adress this in some way,
they are the ones promoting it for xbox,
so they do have some responsibility to make sure it fits :stuck_out_tongue:

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I run my games on a 6 TB Hard drive with no issues

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I have 1.6 TB free so (so far) I don’t worry about it too much, but I did uninstall most of the aircraft that I never fly anyway. What surprised me was that World Update 10 wouldn’t install unless I first reinstalled the 747-8? And Australia wouldn’t install unless I reinstalled the A320?

Is there a way around that? It’s a bit irritating.

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No, it will probably be exceeded. But you don’t need to download every plane, addon and expansion. Just the ones you want to use.

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Not for me. The device I use is limited and only has 1tb. I think I CAN fit a bigger SSD but not sure how reliable it would be (I’ve read some horror stories of overheating) or how to do it myself. I really need to get a desktop once the next gen CPU’s come out!

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Or Il-2 (the original noughties series) with mods. It was couple of hundred gigabytes on HDD.

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I installed World Update 10 with none of the airliners installed prior - and I have the Premium Deluxe version. Very strange!

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ssd’s are all the same size depending on the format, they dont ‘get larger’ for more data space
i bet yours is an m.2 2280 just like mine, you can get larger in that format
ssd’s create Very little heat (no moving parts) and they wont produce More heat for a larger drive
they sell 4tb and larger m.2 ‘2280 internal’ ssd’s already, they are not cheap but are available
then its also possible for us on pc to use symlinks etc and even use an external drive for some things (not really suggested except for maybe addons), things like that are not as easily available on xbox

here is one example that i would guess fits your laptop

im not suggesting you should replace it yourself if your uncomfortable doing so but it Is easily upgradeable (literally plug and play from a hardware standpoint - moving / installing the OS is the biggest concern)

i think the consoles can be upgraded as well? but not sure what limits they may have