FS Fire: the deepest firefighting add-on MSFS 2024 has, and the fires look wrong

On 26 July 2026, with the forest west of Bordeaux genuinely burning and the Sécurité Civile genuinely flying, a poster on the official MSFS forums went looking for the fires in his simulator. He lives in France. He could see the smoke out of the window and none of it in the sim. Three replies down, another user posted a screenshot: an F27 in Sécurité Civile colours turning onto the Bordeaux fires, with a moving map to the left of the cockpit and a scatter of red dots on it exactly where the real ones were. "Use FS Fire by Socosim from the Marketplace," he wrote. "It has all fires in real time worldwide."

That is the best single advertisement FS Fire has, and it is a forum post by a stranger. SoCoSim released the MSFS 2024 build on simMarket on 2 May 2026 and it has been selling steadily ever since — simMarket's weekly chart had it at #13 in the week this review was researched. In the fifteen weeks since launch it has accumulated three ratings on simMarket, four YouTube videos totalling under 4,000 views, and not one written review anywhere. The in-sim Marketplace record that turns up in searches belongs to the MSFS 2020 SKU, not this one — the index that carries it states it covers MSFS 2020 only. FSElite covered this developer's previous firefighting add-on in March 2025 and has not mentioned this one. Threshold has not. The AVSIM thread that exists specifically to compare wildfire add-ons for FS24 drew three replies, none of them from someone who owns FS Fire.

So the record is thin, and it is also unusually consistent. Every person who has publicly rated the product praises the same thing and complains about the same thing. The praise is the scope: live NASA satellite fires anywhere on earth, 325 placed missions, drop physics that actually reads your altitude and groundspeed, synced co-operative multiplayer, and a €12.99 price that does not hide a required aircraft purchase behind it. The complaint is the fire. Zach on 6 May, Demouge on 13 May, Baptiste on 15 July: three buyers, two languages, ten weeks apart, all volunteering unasked that the flames and smoke do not look right. Baptiste gave it five stars and still wrote that the rival product is "bien plus beau à voir".

That is the shape of this review. A firefighting add-on with the deepest feature set in its category and the worst-looking fires in it. Whether that trade is worth €12.99 depends almost entirely on whether you are here to fly a mission or to look at a wildfire.

This review draws on 20 sources: both simMarket listings and the developer's own two websites, the in-sim Marketplace record, the AVSIM and official MSFS forum threads, four YouTube videos, the store pages of the two rival products, and the developer's own earlier firefighting add-on. Reddit is structurally unavailable in our research environment, which normally costs us the sentiment-at-a-glance read; here it matters more than usual, because with six store ratings in total there is very little else to read the room from.

What you are actually buying

FS Fire is not scenery, not an aircraft, and not a career expansion. It is an in-sim toolbar panel — a JavaScript and WASM gauge that opens over your free flight session — which spawns fire simobjects, runs a drop model against them, spawns props, keeps score, and syncs all of it to other players. Nothing about it touches MSFS 2024's native career or the built-in firefighting missions. You open it in free flight, or you do not use it.

SoCoSim sells it as two separate products, and they are genuinely two different builds rather than one listing duplicated:

	FS Fire — MSFS24	FS Fire — MSFS20
simMarket listing	PID 21142, live 2 May 2026	PID 21145, live 4 May 2026
Version on 19 Aug 2026	1.1.4	1.1.0
Download size	26.68 MB	12.56 MB
Price	€12.99 (ex VAT)	€12.99 (ex VAT)
Ratings to date	3	0

The 2024 build is more than twice the size and four point releases ahead. The extra weight is real: only the 2024 version scans your simobject folders to offer add-on aircraft and vehicles as props, and only the 2024 version can hand a drop to MSFS 2024's native firefighting aircraft through the sim's own liquid system rather than through SoCoSim's particle effects. Buy the 2024 SKU if you fly MSFS 2024. There is no reason to consider the 2020 one unless 2020 is the sim you actually use.

The thing to know before you click is that there is no cross-grade. Owning FS Fire for MSFS 2020 gets you nothing off the 2024 build — the only discount attached to the 2024 listing is an €11.99 price for people who previously bought SoCoSim's FS Teleport, an unrelated product. That is a choice, not an oversight, because the same developer handled it differently eighteen months ago: buyers of Aero Fire Global for MSFS 2020 got the MSFS 2024 version free when it landed on 9 March 2025, and simMarket still says so on that product's page — though only for copies bought at simMarket, and only on the same account, so the in-sim Marketplace cohort was never covered. Same house, same two-SKU structure, opposite policy. Own both versions of FS Fire and you have paid €25.98.

On price across stores, be careful with the arithmetic. simMarket's terms say displayed prices include whatever VAT applies, which for a browser session with no country resolved means none — so €12.99 is the pre-tax figure and an EU buyer will pay more at checkout. The MSFS 2020 SKU is listed on the in-sim Marketplace at $14.99; we could find no independently visible Marketplace record for the MSFS 2024 build. Those two numbers look close and are not like-for-like — and note the Marketplace figure is the 2020 product. What holds for either SKU is the delivery constraint: simMarket ships through simInstaller, a Windows application, so the in-sim Marketplace is the only route if you are on Xbox. The developer's own site sells nothing directly — both "Buy Now" buttons on fsfire.net point straight at simMarket.

No aircraft is required. FS Fire's own VFX engine will draw a retardant drop from anything with wings, and it will hang a water bucket under any helicopter. That is worth saying plainly because it is unusual: the €12.99 is the whole cost of entry.

For context on what else you could spend: Cheyenne Design's Wildfires, the direct payware rival, is $22.99 on the Flightsim.to store, released 6 December 2025 and rebuilt in a version 1.1 that landed 31 May 2026. And there is a free option — aarque's Wildfire Panel App on Flightsim.to, published in July 2026, which does the core NASA FIRMS trick with any aircraft in either sim for nothing at all. It is far smaller in scope. It also, revealingly, draws the same complaint in its comments: "Please improve the fire visuals."

What the community consistently praises

The live fire feed is real, and you can check it yourself. SoCoSim publishes the exact VIIRS hotspot layer the add-on loads on fsfire.net, and it populates. The data is NASA's 375-metre active-fire product, refreshed every half hour through the developer's cloud backend, with each hotspot's fire radiative power mapped to a fire size so a major blaze spawns bigger than a roadside burn. This is the part of the product nobody disputes, and the Bordeaux screenshot on the official forums on 26 July 2026 is the proof that it works where it counts — during a real fire season, over the real fire.

It costs €12.99 and that is the whole bill. No tanker, no scooper, no helicopter to buy first. Across the four videos and the three store reviews, nobody has reported an aircraft that would not work with it.

The mission library has no equal in the category. 325 placed incidents worldwide — wildfires, road accidents, boat emergencies, structure fires — each scored on drop efficiency, each awarding gold, silver or bronze, with daily challenges, weekly goals and a logbook that keeps your best run. MSFS Addons, writing on 6 May 2026, called the library considerably larger than anything Aero Fire Global or Wildfires offer, and that has not been contradicted since.

Multiplayer sync works. Two of the three simMarket buyers said so independently and ten weeks apart — Demouge on 13 May 2026 ("le mod multi joueur marche bien") and Baptiste on 15 July 2026 ("marche bien en multijoueur"). Fire state, drops, props and hits all propagate; the host controls spawning. SoCoSim also runs five permanent servers of its own — two US, one European, one on IVAO, one on VATSIM — so the feature is never dead on arrival.

Six languages. Full UI localisation in English, Italian, German, French, Spanish and Portuguese, which at this price is not something most utilities bother with. It shows in the review record: two of the three simMarket ratings are in French.

What keeps coming up as a problem

The fire and smoke effects. Still open, and universal. This is the only complaint the record contains, and every single rater raises it. Zach, 6 May 2026: "Only thing I think needs to be added is better fire affects." Demouge, 13 May 2026: wants the flame effect improved and the smoke colours reworked. Baptiste, 15 July 2026, ten weeks after the first two: the fire detail "est sérieusement à revoir" and the competing Wildfires is far better looking. Three ratings, three complaints, no version note anywhere claiming a fix. As of 19 August 2026 it is open.

The helicopter bucket drifts. Still open. Zach's May review reports the suspended bucket moving out of position while flying with it attached. Nobody has publicly confirmed a fix and there is no changelog to check. It is a single report — normally below our bar for printing — but with a sample this small a single report is a third of the evidence, and it names a specific, reproducible behaviour rather than a mood.

There is no published changelog. Still open. The MSFS 2024 SKU is at 1.1.4 and the MSFS 2020 SKU at 1.1.0. Nothing on fsfire.net, socosim.com or either store says what changed between them or when. For a product whose one known weakness is visual, and whose buyers are explicitly waiting on updates — Demouge wrote that he could not wait for the next ones — a silent version counter is a genuine failure of communication.

Multiplayer is the headline feature and the lobby is empty. On 19 August 2026 the public session browser listed exactly five active sessions. All five were SoCoSim's own permanent servers. Each showed a single occupant and zero props. The synchronisation layer works; there is nobody in it. If you are buying this to fly a co-ordinated attack with strangers, you will be organising it yourself through the Discord, not finding it in the browser.

No cross-grade from the 2020 SKU. Still open, and deliberate. Covered above. The developer's own precedent from March 2025 makes this look worse than it would in isolation.

The in-sim Marketplace record is split and unexplained. Three ratings, averaging 3.7 — two five stars and one single star, none with any written review attached. They belong to the MSFS 2020 listing, so they are not evidence about this build; we record them because searches surface them against this product. simMarket's three average 4.67 against a headline that reads "5". Six ratings in total, disagreeing sharply, none of them explaining why. That is the whole quantitative record for this product.

Performance and stability

We cannot tell you what it costs in frames, and neither can anybody else. Nobody has published a measurement. No independent reviewer has covered the product at all — not FSElite, not Threshold, not any of the written outlets — and the four YouTube videos are demonstrations and streams rather than tests, from channels with 298 to 2,400 views apiece, one of them the developer's own.

What can be said is structural. FS Fire is a 26.68 MB toolbar panel, not an executable, and its load on the sim is a function of how many fire simobjects and props are alive at once. The developer's permanent servers were each carrying between 103 and 240 live fires on 19 August 2026, which suggests the architecture tolerates high counts, but a server-side count is not a frame-rate figure on your machine. If you are running a marginal system and considering the busiest live-fire regions in high summer, treat the performance cost as unmeasured rather than as fine.

On stability, there is one reported bug in the entire public record — the drifting bucket. There are no crash reports, no CTD threads, no complaints about the add-on breaking after a sim update. For a product that has been on sale through two MSFS 2024 update cycles, silence is at least mildly reassuring, though with three ratings on this SKU it is not the same as a clean bill of health.

Who should buy it

The mission-flyer who wants something to do in a helicopter or a tanker. Buy it. 325 scored incidents, medals, a logbook and daily challenges is more structured content than any rival offers, it works with whatever you already fly, and at €12.99 it is the cheapest serious thing in the category by nine dollars. This is the profile the product was built for.

The simmer who wants the real world in the sim. Buy it. This is the cheapest and most direct way to have the actual fires burning in the actual places while you fly, and the July 2026 Bordeaux thread is what that looks like in practice. If your pleasure is flying today's news, the live VIIRS layer alone justifies the money.

The group that already flies together. Buy it, but organise your own sessions. The sync layer is confirmed working by two independent buyers and it spans VATSIM, IVAO and native MSFS multiplayer. Do not buy it expecting to find a populated lobby; on the day we looked there was not one player-hosted session anywhere in the world.

The screenshot flyer, the VR pilot, and anyone whose enjoyment is visual. Do not buy this. The one thing the entire public record agrees on is that the flames and smoke are the weakest part of the product, and the person best placed to compare — a five-star reviewer who owns both — says Cheyenne Design's Wildfires looks considerably better. Spend the extra $10 there, or spend nothing at all and try aarque's free Wildfire Panel App first to find out whether live fires are a thing you actually want.

Anyone who already owns FS Fire for MSFS 2020 and is only occasionally in 2024. Hold off. You will pay the full €12.99 again with no credit for what you own, and the difference between the builds — simobject scanning and native drop handoff — is worth a second purchase only if MSFS 2024 is where you actually fly.

Where it stands today

Fifteen weeks after release, FS Fire is in the odd position of being the most capable product in its category and the least discussed. Nothing else in MSFS aerial firefighting combines live satellite fires, 325 scored missions, aircraft-agnostic drops and working multiplayer for the price of a cheap airport. The parts that are checkable check out: the hotspot feed is live and correct, the multiplayer sync is confirmed by strangers who bought it in different months, the mission count is not disputed by anyone. What is not checkable is everything a reviewer would normally get from the crowd — how the 325 missions hold up over a long evening, what the fires cost in frames over a busy summer in California, whether the drop model rewards flying it properly. Six store ratings cannot answer that, and nobody has written it down.

The gap between the ambition and the record is partly SoCoSim's own doing. A product this feature-dense with no published changelog, no press outreach that any outlet picked up, and a store page that quietly withholds a cross-grade the same developer granted freely eighteen months ago is a product that has not been given much help. The feature list is doing all the selling, and the feature list cannot answer the one question everyone who has bought it keeps asking, which is when the fires will stop looking like fires from a decade-old sim.

Our 3.7 is a deliberately narrow judgement, and it happens to land on the same number as the MSFS 2020 listing's three-rating Marketplace average by coincidence rather than deference. It says: this does more than anything else for the money, it does the difficult technical parts well, and it fails at the easy-looking part that turns out to be the one you stare at for the whole approach. If SoCoSim ships a visual overhaul and writes down what changed, this becomes a straightforward four. Until then it is an excellent piece of engineering with a presentation problem, and which of those two facts matters more to you is genuinely a matter of what you fly for.