29Palms LGSR Santorini: the changelog is more convincing than the store page

Open the 29Palms Santorini store page for MSFS 2024 and then open the one for MSFS 2020 in the next tab, and you can play spot-the-difference for a long time before you find anything. The volcano paragraph is identical. The airport paragraph is identical. The port list, the credits, the thank-you to Yiannis Dermitzakis for the mesh — all identical. Two numbers change, and one sentence is added: "Using the new lighting capabilities of MSFS2024 the main villages received a more precise illumination with physical light." That is the entire on-page case for spending €17.95 again on a scenery you may already own.

The case is much better than that. It is just not on the store page. The actual work — rebuilt runway and taxiway lighting, RTIL added to runway 15, a rebuilt AFCAD with taxiways and start positions that were missing, a re-exported terminal with revised LODs and a redone interior — is in a patch note that MSFS Addons published on 22 July 2026 and that no storefront reproduces. So the people best placed to judge whether the rebuild was worth paying for are the owners of the old one, and on 24 July 2026 one of them stood in the official forum thread and asked the obvious question: "I couldn't spot any major changes in the screenshots… I'm not entirely sure what the upgrade actually offers."

The man who answered him is the same man who wrote the most-read community review of the 2024 original. His answer, in full: the old 2024 compatibility was a straight port, this is a proper native build, "to be honest, I haven't noticed a great deal of difference but there are certainly more details on the airfield." He paid just over four pounds for it and thought that was fine. At €17.95 the sum reads differently.

Underneath the pricing argument is a scenery that has been quietly well-liked for two years and has one persistent weakness that the 2026 rebuild does not touch. And there is one more thing hanging over it: 29Palms shut its own shop on 31 March 2026, and 29palms.net no longer resolves. Everything you buy now runs through Aerosoft One or the Contrail app.

We read 25 sources for this review: three forum threads across AVSIM and the official Microsoft Flight Simulator forums, seven store listings across four retailers, two written reviews, three video showcases, the developer's own product copy and news posts, the two freeware alternatives, and the real-world record on the runway.

What you are actually buying

The airport and the whole island, not one or the other. That is the pitch and it is honoured: the mesh runs at 3 m/pixel across Thira, Therasia, Palaia Kameni, Nea Kameni, Aspronisi and Christiana, the default buildings in every village are deleted and replaced with custom Cycladic ones, six ports are hand-built, and there is an animated Athinios ferry and a working Fira cable car.

Version	Sim	Store	Price	Notes
LGSR Santorini Airport & Island MSFS 2024	MSFS 2024 only, native	Aerosoft	€17.95	v1.0.1, on sale since 22 July 2026
LGSR Santorini Airport & Island MSFS 2024	MSFS 2024 only, native	simMarket	€17.95	Listed 28 July 2026, no customer reviews yet
LGSR Santorini Airport & Island MSFS 2024	MSFS 2024 only, native	Contrail	$21.38 excl. VAT	Also $22.99 at Just Flight
Upgrade for 2020 owners	—	Aerosoft / Contrail	€5.95 / $5.95 excl. VAT	Code LGSR-UP24
Upgrade for 2020 owners	—	simMarket	€5.00	Applied automatically, same account only
LGSR Santorini Airport & Island MSFS	MSFS 2020	Aerosoft / simMarket	€17.95	v1.0.2, still on sale at the same price

Two things about that table matter more than the rest.

The first is that the developer's own store is not in it. 29Palms announced on 7 January 2026 that its shop would close permanently by 31 March, that accounts would be deactivated, that no further downloads of purchased products would be possible, and that customers should back up their files before the deadline. FSElite reported the announcement as saying all existing products had "reached the end of their life cycle, meaning that no new updates, fixes or additional releases will be provided." Six months later Santorini was rebuilt and re-released. That is good news and a badly worded notice, in that order — but if you bought from 29Palms directly, your copy is now a folder on your own disk with no support behind it, and the route back in is to buy again from a retailer.

The second is the version numbers. The MSFS 2024 native build ships as v1.0.1. The MSFS 2020 build it replaces is on v1.0.2. Both figures are printed on Contrail's own product pages. A brand-new product arriving one point release behind the thing it supersedes is not a bug, but it tells you honestly what this is: the same scenery, re-exported, with two years of small fixes folded back in and the counter reset.

And the €17.95 is the same price the 2020 version has carried since June 2024 and still carries today. Buy the wrong one and nothing warns you.

What the community consistently praises

The terminal. Every source that got close to it says the same thing, and the agreement is unusually tight. JakTrax78, writing on the official forums on 4 June 2024, called the textures "very convincing" and singled out their "sunbleached, 'used' look"; Laurie Doering's MSFS Addons review the day before picked out the same weathering, plus the runway skid marks, the fuel facilities and the military area with its camouflaged shelters. The interior is walkthrough-capable and basic, and both reviewers said so without complaint — it is there, it works, it is not the reason you bought this.

Then the small stuff, which is where 29Palms are consistently better than their price bracket. Telegraph poles with messy cables strung between them. FOD bins. Two abandoned airframes near the threshold of runway 15, a BN-2 and a PA-23, both donated models repainted for the job. St Paraskevi's church sitting just outside the southern perimeter. The EKO and GISSCO fuel farms modelled separately rather than as one generic tank yard.

Night lighting is the second thing nobody argues about. The airport is lit entirely with dynamic lights and no baked night textures — a design decision the store copy states plainly and the record supports. JakTrax78's verdict was "night lighting is fab, too", and the 2026 rebuild extended the idea outward: runway and taxiway lighting rebuilt on the 2024 system, RTIL added on runway 15 with the colour of the initial lights corrected, and the caldera villages relit with physical light rather than emissive texture. If you only ever fly one approach into this scenery, make it the 33 approach at dusk.

Accuracy to the real Thira is stronger than the modest price suggests, and it improved this year. Fraport Greece closed LGSR on 12 January 2026 for a full runway reconstruction as part of its fourth phase of works at eight regional airports; the runway came back longer, at 2,340 m against the 2,197 m that was there before, with the runway 15 threshold relocated. 29Palms rebuilt the runway to match, extended taxiway A northward and added a new taxi link — six months after the concrete cured. Wikipedia still lists 2,197 m. The scenery is ahead of the encyclopaedia.

There is a nice piece of evidence for the island's accuracy too, from a sceptic. AVSIM member andy1252 compared the scenery against default and against Google Earth, decided 29Palms had over-populated the caldera, went looking for proof — and found that the satellite imagery he was checking against was about thirteen years old. The real Santorini had built up that much. He bought the product and said so.

What keeps coming up as a problem

The island is not modelled to the standard of the airport. Still open. This is the complaint, it has been the complaint since day two, and the 2026 rebuild does not address it. JakTrax78 on 31 May 2024: Fira "looks nice from a distance but when relatively close, it looks a little generic", with "only two or three truly distinctive structures" and too few of the famous blue domes. In his fuller review four days later he sharpened it: he would expect a clifftop restaurant in one of the most-visited places on earth to be modelled better than a house in the middle of nowhere, and it is not. Fourteen months later, on 1 August 2025, a different poster arrived in the same thread with "muddy textures, buildings floating in the air". The 22 July 2026 changelog lists rebuilt village lighting. It does not list new village buildings.

Ground imagery is soft. Still open, and partly not the developer's fault. The custom ortho is 3 m/pixel, which the store page states honestly and which JakTrax78 pointed out is "not the most detailed". He also noted it reads too green in places for an arid Cycladic island. His own guess at the cause is the interesting part: Greek aerial data is hard to procure. That is a constraint rather than an excuse, but it is a real one, and no competing LGSR does better.

Floating objects. Still open. Buildings floating above the caldera were reported in May 2024 and again in August 2025. A separate report on 27 June 2024 had a parked aircraft hovering fifty feet above stand 7, seen once and never again — that one is more likely a traffic-injector artefact than a scenery fault. The building float has been reported by more than one person more than a year apart, so it counts.

Purple and blue terrain tiles. Fixed, June 2024. Worth recording because of how it was handled. Buyers started reporting corrupted tiles within days of the 30 May 2024 release; Contrail's Lars initially, and reasonably, pointed at a known sim-wide bug, but customer slicker55 uninstalled the payware, found the tiles went away, and said so publicly. On 25 June 2024 the developer — Emmanuel, posting as manwlo — came into the AVSIM thread, said they had found and corrected the part of the scenery causing it, admitted they could not explain why it hit only a handful of users, promised the fix as a free update, and thanked slicker55 by name for testing more than thirty candidate builds. v1.0.1 shipped days later with the fix and reduced stutter. That is the correct way to lose an argument about your own product.

Walking around the airport in MSFS 2024 put you under the scenery. The only customer review on either simMarket listing, a five-star one left in French on 24 January 2025 against the 2020 product, praises the scenery and then notes exactly this. Whether the 2026 native build fixes it we could not establish; nobody has publicly re-tested it since the rebuild, and the changelog does not mention it.

Nothing here engages MSFS 2024's own ground handling. The feature list and the changelog both stop at static apron vehicles, parking positions and an AFCAD rebuild. There is no claim about 2024's airport services, no jetway work, no ground-crew integration. The community answer is a GSX profile, distributed through the Contrail app. For a product whose entire selling point over its predecessor is the word native, that is a conspicuous gap.

Performance and stability

Good, and better than a scenery covering seventy-three square kilometres of custom mesh and rebuilt villages has any right to be. JakTrax78's one-word answer on a Ryzen 7 7800X3D and an RX 7900XTX was "excellent". The published requirement is an RTX 2080 with 8 GB of VRAM and 16 GB of system RAM — a real step up from the 2020 version's GTX 770 and 8 GB, and honest about it.

The dissent is a single AVSIM post saying the scenery is "not optimised too well" alongside a complaint about building textures, which lines up with everyone else's read on the villages rather than contradicting the frame-rate picture. Stutters were reported in June 2024 and the developer said the v1.0.1 fix would "significantly reduce or even eliminate" them; nobody has raised them since.

One practical warning that survives into the 2024 version: this airport conflicts with JustSim's LGSR. Run one or the other. And if you are upgrading from the 2020 product, the old 29palms-airport-lgsr-santorini and 29palms-airport-lgsr-santorini-fixtrees folders must come out first.

Who should buy it

If you own the 2020 version and you fly in MSFS 2024, buy the upgrade. €5.00 at simMarket, €5.95 at Aerosoft and Contrail with code LGSR-UP24. You are buying a native re-export, a rebuilt lighting set, a corrected AFCAD and the new 2,340 m runway. At that price the "I haven't noticed a great deal of difference" verdict is not an argument against it.

If you have no Santorini at all and you fly the Greek islands, buy it at full price. The competition does not exist in any meaningful sense. The flightsim.to freeware LGSR by Redbaron601 is a 1.39 MB airport-only mod with a thousand downloads, no comments and no confirmed 2024 testing; ezro's photogrammetry island is four years old, has a broken patch near the airport and has been reported as failing after recent 2024 updates; JustSim's paid LGSR is a 2021 MSFS 2020 airport with no island, and simMarket has delisted it entirely. This is a contested slot in theory and an empty one in practice.

If you fly VFR and sightsee, buy it — the island is the product. Fira from four hundred feet, the Athinios ferry, the cable car, Ammoudi Bay, the volcano. It is not a photogrammetry-grade recreation and the buildings repeat, but it beats default Santorini by an enormous margin and it is the only paid option that includes the caldera at all.

Do not buy it if you want a ground-up MSFS 2024 airport. This is a 2024-vintage build re-exported for a newer sim, and it behaves like one. If your interest in "native" means the sim's newer airport-services and ground-handling systems being properly wired in, that work is not in this package and is not claimed to be.

Do not buy it at full price if you already own the 2020 version and simply missed the upgrade code. Both products sit at €17.95 on the same shelves. Log in with the account you originally bought from, apply the code, and pay a third of what the store front page will happily charge you.

Where it stands today

The scenery is the same one the community settled on in the summer of 2024: a genuinely good small airport wrapped in an island that is atmospheric rather than accurate, sold for less than most standalone airports of comparable quality. Nothing in the 2026 rebuild changes that judgement, because nothing in the 2026 rebuild was aimed at the part people complain about. The villages that drew the criticism got better lighting and the same buildings.

What did change is the ledger. The runway under you is now the runway Fraport rebuilt in January 2026, the lighting is on the sim's current system rather than the previous one's, and the AFCAD no longer has holes in it. Those are real engineering hours and they deserve to be paid for. The problem is that 29Palms and Aerosoft never told anyone about them where a buyer would look — the store page is the 2020 page with one sentence bolted on — and so the release landed to a shrug from the very forum that had championed the original. When the most enthusiastic advocate a product has says he cannot see much difference, the marketing has failed the developer, not the other way round.

That leaves an odd position at the end of August 2026. As a €5 upgrade it is obviously worth taking. As a €17.95 first purchase it is a fair deal in an empty field. As a full-price second purchase for someone who already owns it and never spots the code, it is close to indefensible — and it is entirely within Aerosoft's power to fix that with a line of text.