I had just the one prior to the GOTY mandatory update. I find the mandatory aspect very annoying. Other software advises of updates but you can choose when to carry it out and continue using the current version if you so desire.
The GOTY update was so large that I didn’t have enough space on my hard drive so I had to buy a 2TB portable drive which became my D drive.
After downloading the update (it took 12 hours and $$ in extra bandwidth charges!) I discovered that I had the plain, vanilla sim. All the add-on scenery, aircraft mods etc were missing although the Community folder was unchanged.
I thought, “If the updated sim is on D drive then I should copy the Community folder onto that drive too – D:/Users/User/Appdat/Roaming/Microsoft Flight Simulator/Packages. But it didn’t work.
To cut a long story short, after hours of trial and error and research I discovered that the GOTY update uses the folder at D:/Users/Community.
If I delete the folders in the other locations I can recover 55GB of memory. I am tempted to do so but should I rename then “OldCommunity”? That means that FS2020 doesn’t recognize them, right?, and will rely on the D:/Users/Community folder.
If all goes well I can then delete the unwanted folders.
There is only one Community folder. Now that you have found out which one the game is reading you can cut-paste all mods into D:/Users/Community & get rid of the others.
As a test you can move just ONE mod into D:/Users/Community. Preferably a plane - which will appear in the aircraft selection menu. This way you’ll know instantly which folder is being read.
After that just dump all mods into D:/Users/Community
Side note: if you delete the Community folder that the game DOES use then MSFS will simply make another one during next startup.
In case you’re not familiar - I highly recommend the excellent Addons Linker software (free) which uses Symbolic Links and lets you keep your mods anywhere. It makes Windows “think” they are in Community when they aren’t. This leaves you free to place them anywhere.
You can have as many community folders as you like; only one will be used by the sim, and that will be in the packages folder that you pointed the sim to on installation. (I believe you can change it afterwards but I’ve never tried.)
I have two: one in the default location on C: where the sim is installed, and one in D:\FSPackages, which I created myself.
The one in the default location is unused and remains empty. Maybe the sim expects to find it there so I leave it alone, as it doesn’t use any space.
Well this is wierd - I was wondering what the OP could have been talking about so I had a little dig around myself with a search and found two more(!) Community folders. Note that I’m on Steam and have my FS2020 install on my G drive together with a symlinked Users folder also on my G: drive
Both Community and Official folders here are empty:
though what I can see is simply a collection of empty folders and not an actual file in sight.
My first suspicion is that one or more 3rd party app has gotten confused and created them at some point but I’m going to wipe the lot and see if they return.
Thank you KatanaDV20, I downloaded a livery to my D:/Users/Community folder and it appeared in the liveries selection screen. I can now delete the other folders.
Your current Community folder can always be found by opening the file UserCfg.opt and looking at the last line. That path points to your Packages folder, which contains both Community and Official (sim related) folders.
