Seasons Enhanced by Bijan: MSFS 2024 already has seasons, so what is the €17.95 for?

On 27 November 2024, two days after this add-on appeared, a poster on AVSIM asked the only question that really matters about it: "I thought 2024 had seasons by default, so what is it that Bijan's product will add to the party?" Five people liked the post. Eighteen months later, in May 2026, someone on the same thread asked it again in blunter terms — what does this do that a free tree-removal mod from flightsim.to does not?

There is a second suspicion attached to this product, and it deserves killing early because it is wrong. Bijan Habashi's seasons work for Microsoft Flight Simulator was never freeware. It was sold on simMarket from its earliest public versions in 2020, it was on the in-sim Marketplace as four separate season packs by 2021, and the community friction at the time ran in exactly the opposite direction to the one people now remember. "I remember the earlier days of the initial release and how people on this forum lambasted Bijan for not making the mod available for free," a customer wrote in the official forum on 13 May 2021. There was no freeware-to-payware turn. There was a paid mod that became so widely installed that people began to think of it as part of the sim.

What it is, then, is easier to say than the name suggests. Despite the word "Seasons", this is not primarily a seasons mod. MSFS 2024 has its own seasonal system, and it works after a fashion. What Bijan sells is a global replacement of the simulator's vegetation layer — tree species, heights, densities and biome boundaries — bolted to a second, stranger project: the hand-removal of the melted photogrammetry "trees" that Asobo's scanning process leaves smeared across cities, parks and airport boundaries worldwide. The changelogs are not feature lists. They are lists of places. Bryce Canyon. Broken Hill Airport. Tom McCall Waterfront Park in Portland. Forty-five bridges in New York where the satellite imagery of the bridge deck had been baked into the water underneath.

That is the actual product, and it explains both the devotion and the caveats. You are buying one man's ongoing effort to hand-correct a simulator that keeps changing underneath him. As recently as this morning — 20 August 2026 — the developer posted that Sim Update 6 "changed the way trees are placed" and had expanded tree coverage into areas where trees were never meant to be, and that he was working through a list of locations to fix.

We read 22 sources for this review: both store listings, the developer's own product, changelog and update pages, the 4,900-post official forum thread, three AVSIM threads, a PMDG forum thread, five MSFS bug-report threads, two independent video reviews and two written news pieces. Reddit, which is normally where you take a sentiment reading at a glance, is unavailable to us, so treat the absence of r/flightsim below as a gap in method rather than a gap in the record.

What you are actually buying

One product, three places to buy it, and a separate product entirely if you are still on MSFS 2020.

Where	Price	Notes
simMarket (PID 19634)	€ 17.95	176.59 MB, listed since 25 November 2024, currently v4.9. Delivered through the simMarket app only
bijanstudio.com	$ 17.95	Direct from the developer; download link by email
In-sim Marketplace	not verified	Available for PC and Xbox since 25 August 2025, per the developer
Upgrade path	€ 9.95	simMarket only, and only for accounts that already bought 4 SEASON PACK V8 MSFS20
MSFS 2020 equivalent	$ 9.95	Four Season Pack for MSFS 2020 — a separate purchase that does not work in MSFS 2024

Do not read the two headline prices as a like-for-like comparison. simMarket's own currency widget converts € 17.95 to $ 20.83, which makes the developer's direct store look the cheaper door — but simMarket's displayed figure is a VAT-inclusive price whose VAT rate depends on the country your session resolves to, so an unresolved session shows the price at 0% and a resolved EU session will not. Check the number at the payment page, in your own country, before deciding you saved anything. The one thing the direct store cannot give you is the € 9.95 upgrade, which exists at simMarket alone.

Note also that the price has moved. In November 2024 an AVSIM poster who wanted the upgrade discount complained about being asked "the full 16,xx€ price". The launch price was € 15.95. It is € 17.95 now — a rise of about 12.5% over 21 months, against roughly twenty releases in that time.

The requirements line on the simMarket listing is short and you should take it literally: "Not compaible with any other tree mod." This is not a soft warning. In November 2023, two AVSIM users spent a day working out why their autumn colours had stopped appearing, and the answer was two other vegetation mods sitting in the Community folder. The add-on replaces the sim's vegetation definitions wholesale. Anything else that touches the same files loses, silently.

What the community consistently praises

The photogrammetry cleanup is the thing nothing else does, and it is where the enthusiasm concentrates. Removing the fused, drooping tree blobs that photogrammetry leaves around downtown areas and airport perimeters is manual, location-by-location work, and the developer says so plainly on the product page: "Thousands of hours of manual work have gone into cleaning and reforesting areas." A simMarket reviewer on 11 March 2025 wrote that the last update had cleaned up the photogrammetry around Geneva "making this airport nice and usable again" and that he would have bought it for that alone.

The second repeated praise is biome correctness — the sense that places stop looking the same as each other. "From the moment I started using it, the whole world stopped looking the same everywhere," one AVSIM poster wrote on 17 May 2026. Midwest US users report deciduous trees instead of blanket conifers. Australian users report gum trees "and not cotton wool balls". The MSFS 2024 base sim genuinely does get this wrong: its own bug forum carries a 186-post thread from 25 November 2024 titled "Excessive amount of trees", a 22-post thread on missing Southern Hemisphere seasons, and an 89-post thread complaining that Europe in autumn renders brown and desaturated.

Third, and most unusual, is the developer's presence. The official forum thread has run since 23 September 2021, carries over 4,900 posts and 243,000 views, and Bijan Habashi has posted in it on most days of the last three months. Users name a location, he adds it to a list, and it turns up in a changelog. Between 1 May and 5 June 2026 alone he shipped five releases — 3.9, 3.9a, 4.0, 4.1 and 4.2.

Fourth, performance. The developer's position, stated in the forum on 10 February 2025, is that there is "no performance hit as it uses the same tree models", and the record broadly bears that out; several buyers claim modest gains in dense photogrammetry areas, which is plausible given that removing photogrammetry trees removes geometry.

The ratings, checked

simMarket shows a headline "5" over 31 reviews. The spread is 25 five-star, 5 four-star, 1 three-star, which averages 4.77, not 5.0. The developer's own store shows 4.9 over 63 reviews with a spread of 57/6/0/0/0, which does average 4.90. Both are unusually clean books. Neither is a large enough sample to carry a purchase on its own.

What keeps coming up as a problem

Exclusivity with every other vegetation mod — still open, and permanent by design. You cannot run this alongside another tree mod. First documented at scale in an AVSIM thread of 2–5 November 2023, restated in the store requirements, unchanged today.

Conflicts with third-party airport scenery — mitigated, case by case, forever. Because the add-on adds and removes vegetation at specific coordinates, it collides with payware and freeware airports that do their own landscaping. Version 3.9a of 13 May 2026 lists "Fixed conflict with lisium-airport-lgir-heraklion" as a headline item. On 18 August 2026 a customer reported unresolved conflicts at EFHK, EDDL and EFKT and said his support ticket had gone a week without a reply; the developer answered publicly within hours and said he had never received it. That exchange is the whole pattern in miniature — responsive, but a queue of one.

Every sim update restarts the race — still open. Sim Update 2's beta in March 2025 produced a run of CTD reports that several users pinned on this add-on and others insisted were the beta's fault; the developer's reply on 27 March 2025 was that many people were seeing crashes "even with empty community folder". Sim Update 6, this month, changed tree placement again. Buying this product is buying a subscription to somebody else's maintenance treadmill, without a subscription's guarantees.

Delivery and versioning friction — mitigated. simMarket delivers only through its app, which several buyers found awkward in January 2025; the developer's answer, fairly, was that "it's impossible to please everyone". The in-sim Marketplace copy lags the direct one — in August 2025 a buyer found Marketplace on 3.1.1 while the direct download was numbered differently, and there is a live example of the version naming itself being ambiguous, with 3.9a and 3.95 in circulation for the same build in May 2026.

The developer's own documentation has fallen behind — still open. The site's /updates page still describes work planned for version 2.8 against the Sim Update 2 beta, a state of affairs from spring 2025. The product is on 4.9. The /past-updates page is complete and current; the forward-looking one is more than a year stale.

Regional cleanup sold separately — still open, and contested. Some city-scale photogrammetry work ships as its own product — Honolulu, Vancouver, Los Angeles boats. A customer argued on 22 July 2025 that the Vancouver tree improvements should have been part of Seasons Enhanced rather than a separate SKU; the developer's reply was that nothing else on the market removes photogrammetry trees from a city at all. Both are true. Where the line falls between "free monthly update" and "new product" is set by one person with no published rule.

Public support is being withdrawn to email — still open. Through August 2026 the developer answered forum support questions with "For any support questions, please email me directly", and a community moderator reminded the thread that third-party support does not belong in the official forums. That is correct policy and a real loss: the searchable public record of what breaks and what gets fixed is thinning at exactly the point a buyer would want to consult it.

A precedent worth knowing about. On 2 November 2023, an AVSIM user reported that his MSFS 2020 pack had stopped working, that the developer had said he still supported it, and that a week had passed with no reply; another poster believed the product had not been updated "since a while ago". In December 2024 a returning customer wrote to Bijan: "I know you left for a while too. Glad you're back." The 2026 cadence is excellent. It has not always been.

Performance and stability

There is no credible evidence of a frame-rate cost. The add-on swaps vegetation definitions and asset placements rather than adding new higher-cost models, and the developer's claim that it uses the same tree models is consistent with everything buyers report. A simMarket reviewer on 2 May 2025 went further and said it "even improves FPS in some certain locations", which is exactly what you would expect where photogrammetry geometry has been stripped out.

Stability is a more interesting question, and the honest answer is that the add-on has been accused more often than convicted. The March 2025 Sim Update 2 beta produced repeatable CTDs for at least two users that went away when the mod was removed, at Corsica's LFKB and at Granada — and simultaneously produced CTDs for people running an empty Community folder. One standalone bug report on 23 May 2025 claimed reliable crashes ten minutes into any flight with the mod installed; it attracted four replies and no corroboration. Across nearly two years and a five-figure user base, that is a thin charge sheet.

The install has got easier. At launch in November 2024 it required backing up and deleting an official fs-base-biomes file, which the developer said at the time he was discussing with Asobo; it is now an unzip into the Community folder, or an app install.

Who should buy it

The VFR and bush pilot who flies below 5,000 feet. Buy it. Everything this add-on does happens in the band where you actually look out of the window, and the improvement in regional character is the single largest visual change available to MSFS 2024 for under twenty euros.

The helicopter pilot working over cities. Buy it, but check the changelog for your patch first. Photogrammetry cleanup is the marquee feature and it is location-by-location — Los Angeles, San Diego, Vancouver, Sydney and Boston are well covered; your city may not be. Ask, and it may be in the next release.

The Southern Hemisphere simmer. Buy it. The base simulator's seasonal handling south of the equator was reported broken in December 2024 and the developer's own answer in that thread was that default seasons were "mostly missing" there. This is the fix.

The airliner pilot who flies flight-level hub to hub. Do not buy it. You will see the terrain masking and little else, and there is nothing here for you at cruise. Spend the money on weather or an aircraft.

Anyone with a Community folder built around other vegetation mods. Do not buy it, or accept that you are deleting the rest of your vegetation setup. This is an all-or-nothing replacement and the incompatibility is structural, not a bug awaiting a fix.

The buyer who wants a supported product rather than a supported person. Think hard. This is one individual with an email address, no company behind him, and a documented quiet spell in 2023. The current level of service is exceptional and it is not contractual.

Where it stands today

As of 20 August 2026 the product is at version 4.9, sold at € 17.95 on simMarket and $ 17.95 direct, and it has no competitor. REX's AccuSeason Advanced, the obvious rival on MSFS 2020, never came to MSFS 2024 — REX's 2024-generation product is the weather engine Atmos CORE, which does not do this job. Nothing else on either store does global biome correction plus photogrammetry cleanup. That is not a claim the marketing makes; it is simply where the market is.

The competition, in other words, is Asobo. And Asobo is a moving target in both directions: World Update 22's national parks arrived carrying fresh photogrammetry trees that the developer publicly declined to clean up until Microsoft responds, and Sim Update 6 has just redistributed autogen trees into places that need another pass. This add-on is worth what it is worth precisely because the base simulator keeps needing it. If Asobo ever fixes vegetation placement properly, most of this product evaporates — and the developer would presumably be the first to say good.

For now the arithmetic is straightforward. Twenty-odd releases in twenty-one months, a developer who answers on the same day, a genuinely unique cleanup system, and one hard structural cost: it owns your vegetation layer outright and it will fight your airport sceneries occasionally. At € 17.95 that is comfortably good value for anyone who flies low. It is close to worthless for anyone who does not.