Prioritization of Scenery Packs

X-Plane scenery packs are loaded in priority order; in order to ensure that you see your payware or custom scenery, it must be higher priority than the global airports. The system for prioritizing scenery packs changed in X-Plane 10.20, so please read this carefully!

Scenery packs in “Custom Scenery” are loaded in the order of scenery_packs.ini (a text file in the Custom Scenery folder). Custom scenery packs at the top of the .ini file are loaded first and override packs below them. The scenery_packs.ini file lets users disable and re-prioritize scenery packs without having to rename anything.

Any time X-Plane runs and finds a scenery pack not in the .ini, it adds it to the top of the file; therefore when you install new scenery, it starts at the highest priority level. Usually this is what you want.

The airports from the X-Plane Airport Gateway are in a scenery pack called “Global Airports” in your custom scenery – this pack should be higher priority than any base meshes but lower priority than any custom airports.

Things To Do

Place new scenery in the Custom Scenery folder as usual. Edit the .ini file to get things the way you want – it’s there for you to customize.

You can use SCENERY_PACK_DISABLED to prevent X-Plane from loading individual scenery packs, in particular for any default scenery you do not want displayed. For example, editing the scenery_packs.ini file line

SCENERY_PACK Custom Scenery/KSEA Demo Area/

to

SCENERY_PACK_DISABLED Custom Scenery/KSEA Demo Area/

would prevent the default demo area scenery from loading.

Things Not To Do

There are a few things we strongly recommend you not do in trying to resolve scenery conflicts:

• Don’t modify, rename or delete the scenery packs that come with X-Plane. The updater is just going to try to restore them every time there is an update. You’ll be pushing the rock up the hill over and over again. Don’t delete individual airports out of Global Airports – the installer will just put them back.
• Don’t constantly delete scenery_packs.ini. Some users  like to rename their folders to alphabetical, delete the .ini file and let it rebuild each time. But this violates the renaming rule and means updates won’t go well.

Back to Knowledge Base