FS Fire for MSFS 2020: four patches behind its twin, and still the only option in your sim

On simMarket's weekly bestseller chart this morning, FS Fire appears twice. At number 17, FS FIRE - MSFS24. At number 39, FS FIRE - MSFS20. Same name, same developer, same €12.99, twenty-two places apart. Click either one and the marketing copy is identical to the sentence — right down to a line in the MSFS 2020 listing offering you "MSFS 2024 file system scanned simobjects".

They are not the same file. SoCoSim ships two builds. The MSFS 2024 one is product 21142, went live on 2 May 2026, is 26.68 MB and currently reads version 1.1.4. The MSFS 2020 one is product 21145, went live two days later on 4 May 2026, is 12.56 MB, and has read version 1.1.0 every day since. Four point releases have shipped to one twin and none to the other, and there is no changelog anywhere on either store or on any of the developer's own websites to explain what those four releases contained.

That sounds like the whole review, and it is not, because the MSFS 2020 buyer is in a strange position. Every serious rival left. Cheyenne Design's Wildfires — the $22.99 product that FS Fire's own critics keep pointing at as the better-looking one — lists MSFS2024 as a hard requirement. MSFS 2024's aerial firefighting career activity is, obviously, in MSFS 2024. The Miltech Mission Hub that AVSIM regulars recommend for home-made fire missions is a 2024 tool. If you fly MSFS 2020 and you want a wildfire to fly at, your options are this, the same developer's older Aero Fire Global at the same €12.99, and one free toolbar panel on Flightsim.to.

And the public record on this particular build is close to silent. In fifteen weeks: no written review, no independent video, not one forum post by somebody running it in MSFS 2020. simMarket's listing still says "Review it now" because nobody ever has. What does exist sits in the one place nobody thinks to look — the MSFS 2020 in-sim Marketplace, where three people have rated it 3.7 out of 5. Two gave it five stars. One gave it one. None of them wrote a word.

This review draws on 26 sources: both simMarket listings, simMarket's weekly chart, the MSFS 2020 Marketplace record and its rating breakdown, the developer's two websites and its live session browser, four AVSIM threads, two official MSFS forum threads, the trade coverage of the launch, three YouTube videos, the two rival products' store pages, the MSFS 2024 SDK documentation, and the same developer's previous firefighting add-on with its six customer reviews and its own 42-rating Marketplace record. Reddit is structurally unavailable in our research environment. That normally costs us a sentiment read; on a product this quiet it costs us most of what a 2020 owner would have said out loud.

What you are actually buying

FS Fire is a toolbar panel, not a mission pack and not an aircraft. You open it inside a free flight, and it layers fires onto the world you are already in. The MSFS 2020 store page lists seven jobs it does: pull live NASA VIIRS hotspots and size each one by its radiative power, let you spawn your own fires by map click or coordinate, calculate retardant and water drops against your altitude AGL and ground speed, hang a bucket under any helicopter with water scooping, run 325 scored missions with gold-silver-bronze medals and a persistent logbook, place simobject props on a map to build a scene, and sync all of the above to other players over VATSIM, IVAO or native MSFS multiplayer. No specific aircraft is required — the drop effects come from the add-on's own VFX engine.

That last point carries more weight on MSFS 2020 than it does next door. MSFS 2024 shipped with the CL-415, the AT-802 Fire Boss and a documented aerial firefighting career activity; MSFS 2020 has none of that. On 2020, FS Fire's own effects engine is not a fallback for people without the right aeroplane, it is the only mechanism there is.

The two SKUs, as they stood on 20 August 2026:

	FS Fire — MSFS24	FS Fire — MSFS20
simMarket product	PID 21142, live 2 May 2026	PID 21145, live 4 May 2026
Version today	1.1.4	1.1.0
Download size	26.68 MB	12.56 MB
simMarket price	€12.99	€12.99
simMarket ratings	3 (2×5★, 1×4★ — a true mean of 4.67 against a headline that reads "5")	none
In-sim Marketplace	listed by the developer; not independently visible to us	USD 14.99, added 3 June 2026, 3.7/5 from 3 ratings — 67% five-star, 33% one-star
simMarket weekly chart	#17	#39
Upgrade price for existing customers	€11.99 if you own FS Teleport MSFS24	none offered

Read the last row twice. There is no cross-grade between the two builds in either direction — owning one gets you nothing off the other — and yet the 2024 listing does carry a discount, for people who bought an unrelated relocation utility from the same developer. The 2020 listing carries no upgrade offer at all. This is not how the house normally behaves. On the same store, Aero Fire Global 24 says it in plain type: "If you previously purchased AERO FIRE GLOBAL MSFS20 at simMarket, you are entitled for a free upgrade." That was March 2025, same developer, same two-SKU structure, opposite policy. Buy both versions of FS Fire and you have paid €25.98.

On price across stores, be careful with the arithmetic before you decide you have found a bargain. simMarket's displayed prices include whatever VAT applies to your resolved session, which for an anonymous browser is none, so €12.99 is a pre-tax figure and an EU buyer will see more at checkout. The MSFS 2020 in-sim Marketplace shows USD 14.99, with tax handled by Microsoft at its own checkout. Those are not like-for-like numbers and we are not going to tell you one store is cheaper, because that depends entirely on where you live. What is decidable: simMarket delivers this through simInstaller, a Windows desktop application, so if you fly MSFS 2020 on Xbox the Marketplace is not the cheaper route, it is the only route. The developer sells nothing directly — both buttons behind the "Get FS Fire" panel on fsfire.net point at simMarket and the in-sim store.

What the community consistently praises

Almost everything below comes from people running the MSFS 2024 build. We are flagging that at every step rather than quietly folding it into a verdict about a product they did not buy.

The live fire feed is what people volunteer without being asked. When wildfires burned near Bordeaux in July 2026 and an MSFS forum thread filled up with people complaining that the sim showed nothing, the answer came from a stranger with a screenshot of an F27 in Sécurité Civile colours and a map full of red dots in the right places: "use FS Fire by Socosim from the Marketplace, it has all fires in real time worldwide." The trade write-up at MSFS Addons on 6 May 2026 led with the same feature, and all three simMarket reviewers mention it. Nobody disputes that this part works.

Multiplayer synchronisation is the second thing people mention and the second thing nobody disputes. Baptiste (15 July 2026) opens with it — it works well in multiplayer, he writes, before turning on the rest. Zach (6 May 2026) calls MP support with live fires the reason to buy. The Australian group-flight organisers who run weekly public events on the official forums have built at least eight of them around FS Fire since late May, spawning fires at oil rigs, valleys and Spanish hillsides for other pilots to attack. Those events are all MSFS 2024.

It works with any aircraft, and on MSFS 2020 that is the whole ballgame. This is the one praise item where the 2020 build has a stronger case than the 2024 one, because it has no native firefighting to compete with.

The prop placer is quietly the best-liked part. An AVSIM thread on 24 May 2026 asking for a simple object placer for MSFS landed on FS Fire's scene builder as the answer — hundreds of default simobjects, spawn by map click, drag to reposition, save the scene. People are buying a fire add-on and using it as a set-dressing tool.

Fifteen weeks in, the 2020 SKU is still selling. #39 in simMarket's weekly top fifty is not a triumph, but it is not a corpse either, and it is the only quantitative signal of any kind that the 2020 build has a user base.

And on the 2020 build specifically, that is the end of the list. Two anonymous five-star Marketplace ratings. No text, no names, no screenshots, no video.

What keeps coming up as a problem

The 2020 build has not moved since launch. Still open. Version 1.1.0 on 4 May, version 1.1.0 today. The version field on simMarket is not decorative — the same developer's Aero Fire Global MSFS20 reads 3.0.1 against an August 2024 release date, so the store does show patches when they happen. Against that, the MSFS 2020 Marketplace record for FS Fire was touched on 19 August 2026, the day before we wrote this. Two stores, two stories, and no changelog anywhere to settle which one is telling the truth. That absence is itself the complaint.

There is no changelog. Still open. Not on fsfire.net, not on socosim.com, not on southoakco.com, not on either store listing. For a product whose paying customers are explicitly waiting on updates — Demouge wrote on 13 May 2026 that he could not wait for the next ones, specifically for improvements to the flame effect and smoke colour — a silent version counter is a failure of communication rather than of code, and it is the failure that makes every other question here unanswerable.

No cross-grade, and no upgrade price of any kind on the 2020 listing. Still open, and deliberate. Covered above. The March 2025 precedent from the same developer makes it look worse than it would in isolation.

Toggles that do not stay off. Still open. Three reports, two products, sixteen months, no public reply to any of them. On FS Fire: an AVSIM member asked on 21 May 2026 whether anyone else had live fires being drawn in the sim with the toggle turned off, and on 9 August 2026 the same member reported that FS Fire's own bucket keeps reappearing under a Miltech CH-47D after every scoop, even with the visible bucket switched off in the panel. Both threads have zero replies. On the developer's earlier add-on, a French buyer wrote on 7 September 2025 that the fuselage drop fires even with the switch set to OFF. Both FS Fire reports come from MSFS 2024 users; we cannot tell you whether the 2020 build behaves the same way, and neither can anyone else.

The fires look wrong — but we cannot prove that about this build. On the 2024 SKU the complaint is unanimous among people who have written anything at all. Baptiste: the fire detail seriously needs revision, and visually the rival Wildfires is much better to look at. Zach wants better fire effects. Demouge wants the flame effect and the smoke colours improved. That is every written review the 2024 build has. What we can add from the 2020 side is circumstantial and cuts both ways. The same developer's 2020-era fire tech splits its customers down the middle — one reviewer calls the rendering very disappointing and the fires tiny, another says the drops are magnificent — and the free rival that does run on MSFS 2020, aarque's Wildfire Panel App, drew the identical note from its top commenter on 1 August 2026: brilliant, but please improve the fire visuals. That suggests the problem is at least partly a genre problem in a sim engine that does not want to draw a wildfire. It does not establish anything about FS Fire 1.1.0 on MSFS 2020, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

The co-op room is next door. We took a snapshot of every live FS Fire session on 20 August 2026. Seven were running. Five were SoCoSim's own permanent servers — one MSFS 2020 server near KSLC carrying 159 live fires, two MSFS 2024 servers, one on IVAO, one on VATSIM — each with a single occupant. The two player-hosted sessions were both MSFS 2024. The synchronisation layer works. On MSFS 2020, there is currently nobody in it but the developer's own machine.

One rating in three is a single star, and nobody knows why. The MSFS 2020 Marketplace shows 3.7 from three evaluations: 67% at five stars, 33% at one. That is the entire quantitative record of this build, it is bimodal, and not one of the three raters attached any text.

Performance and stability

Nobody has tested this build. That is not a rhetorical flourish — there is no independent video, no written review, no forum thread, and no store review text for FS Fire on MSFS 2020, so any frame-rate claim we made would be invented.

What can be said is structural. This is a 12.56 MB toolbar panel with a cloud backend, not an executable, and its cost to your sim is a function of how many fire and prop simobjects are alive at once rather than of the panel itself. The developer's permanent servers were each carrying between 159 and 347 live fires on 20 August 2026, which at least suggests the architecture tolerates high counts on the server side. Whether MSFS 2020 tolerates that many spawned objects on your machine is exactly the question nobody has answered in public, and the honest advice is to start with a handful of manually spawned fires before you turn the live global feed loose.

One practical note that is not about frame rates. The simMarket route installs through simInstaller and is Windows-only; the in-sim Marketplace route is what the developer points Xbox owners at, and it is the only FS Fire listing for MSFS 2020 we could independently confirm exists.

Who should buy it

You fly MSFS 2020 and you want live wildfires in it. Buy it. This is the most complete thing available in your simulator, at €12.99, and the reason it is the most complete thing is that everyone else building in this category has moved to MSFS 2024. Go in knowing you are buying the build that is four point releases behind, and that you will be finding out things about it that nobody has written down.

You fly MSFS 2024, occasionally load 2020, and thought you would save money here. Do not buy this SKU. Buy the 2024 one. It is the maintained build, it is twice the download, it hands drops to the sim's native firefighting aircraft, and it is where every other human being using this product currently is.

You already own FS Fire for MSFS 2024. Do not buy it. You will pay the full €12.99 again with no credit of any kind, for a thinner build of software you own, to fly in a simulator you are presumably keeping for other reasons. The only version of this purchase that makes sense is if MSFS 2020 is where you genuinely spend your evenings.

You already own Aero Fire Global for MSFS 2020. This is the real upgrade decision, and it is finely balanced. What you gain is 325 structured missions, working multiplayer, the prop scene builder and the mission logbook. What you pay is another full €12.99, because SoCoSim did not carry its own 2025 upgrade policy across to this product. If you use Aero Fire Global as a fire-spawner and nothing more, you are probably fine where you are.

You have never tried live-fire flying and are not sure you want it. Install aarque's free Wildfire Panel App from Flightsim.to first. It ships a genuine MSFS 2020 version, it pulls the same NASA FIRMS data, it works with any aircraft, and it costs nothing. If it turns out you want missions, medals and a co-pilot, come back and pay the €12.99 knowing why.

Xbox on MSFS 2020. The in-sim Marketplace at USD 14.99 is your only route; simMarket cannot deliver this to you.

Where it stands today

Fifteen weeks after release, FS Fire for MSFS 2020 is a real product with a real feature set that almost nobody has said anything about. It sells steadily enough to hold a place in simMarket's weekly fifty. It has three anonymous ratings, two of them delighted and one of them furious. Its developer keeps a permanent MSFS 2020 fire server running at his own expense, which is a form of support that costs money every month and says something about intent. And its version number has not moved since the day it launched, while its twin's has moved four times.

Those two facts do not resolve into a story, and we are not going to force them to. The most likely reading is the dullest one: the MSFS 2020 build works, it does not need the patches the 2024 build needed because it does not have the 2024 build's simobject scanning and native drop handoff to break, and SoCoSim has simply not thought to tell anyone. The least charitable reading is that the 2020 SKU was a two-day port taken along for the ride and is now being sold at full price beside a product receiving all the attention. A single published changelog would settle it. There isn't one, so the buyer carries the risk, and the score below reflects that rather than any defect anyone has demonstrated.

Our 3.4 is lower than the 3.7 we gave the MSFS 2024 build, and the gap is not about the software. It is the same panel, the same live satellite feed, the same 325 missions, the same physics on the drop. It is about the position the 2020 customer is put in: the same price for a smaller file on an older version, no upgrade path in either direction while the other SKU has one, no changelog, no reviews, and a multiplayer browser in which his simulator is represented by a single machine belonging to the developer. If SoCoSim publishes a changelog and brings 1.1.4 across, this becomes a straightforward recommendation at a fair price the same afternoon.