FS Fire — Aerial Firefighting for MSFS

// Core Features

EVERYTHING YOU NEED
TO FIGHT FIRE

FS Fire brings the intensity of aerial firefighting into MSFS with realistic simulation, live satellite data, and deep multiplayer support.

🔥

Total Fire Control

FS Fire pulls real active fire data from NASA's VIIRS satellites — Suomi NPP, NOAA-20, and NOAA-21 — at 375m resolution, refreshed every 30 minutes by a cloud backend. Each hotspot's fire radiative power (FRP) is mapped to an appropriate fire size — so a major California blaze spawns differently than a small brush fire. Beyond live data, you can manually spawn custom fires anywhere in the world using map-click placement or direct coordinates, with sizes from 1 to 10. Enable wind-driven spread and fires will grow and shift downwind in real time based on wind speed and direction. Larger fires require multiple hits to extinguish — click any fire icon on the map to track its current extinguish percentage.

🛩️

Physics-Based Drop System

Drop calculations factor your altitude AGL, ground speed, and heading to place retardant or water exactly where physics says it should land. Elliptical splash zones grow with altitude and airspeed, forward travel is modeled, and hits are computed against a dynamic fire radius. Works with any aircraft via the FS Fire VFX engine, or with native MSFS firefighting capable aircraft. Choose unlimited drops, set how many drops you get from a full tank, or enable the "Tank Refill" capability. Red retardant leaves a visible stain on the ground that acts as a firebreak, and armed GPS drops draw their trigger ring on the map at true ground scale.

🌐

Full Multiplayer Support

Host a session and fly with other players across VATSIM, IVAO, or native MSFS multiplayer. Fire state, prop objects, VFX drops, and retardant hits all sync in real time. Session hosts have total control over a session — live fire spawning, manual fire spawning, prop spawning, and guest management functions. All fires, props, drops, and drop effects are seamlessly synced in multiplayer.

🪣

Helicopter Bucket

Spawn a suspended helicopter water bucket under any helicopter, complete with water scooping capability over any body of water and realistic drop physics and effects. Position the bucket left/right, forward/aft and up/down in feet to hang correctly from whatever you fly, and tune how freely it swings with your pitch, roll and yaw.

🎯

Mission System

325 handcrafted missions at real-world POIs globally — fires, vehicle incidents, boat emergencies, and structure fires. Each mission logs your drop efficiency (minimum drops ÷ actual drops × 100%) and awards Gold, Silver, or Bronze medals. Daily Challenges double your points, Weekly Goals track ongoing progress, and a persistent logbook stores your best result per mission. Missions can be completed solo or in multiplayer with the help of others.

🗺️

Live Moving Map

A multi-layer map follows your aircraft in real time using a 30 fps physics interpolation loop. Toggle track-up or north-up, use the declutter control to filter between all markers, fires only, or none. Switch on the Reported Fire Incident Feed for real-world wildfires across the US, Canada and Europe. Fire icons change colour as you work them, so you can see at a glance which are nearly out. Click any fire marker for a popup with size and AGL data, draw a fire line between two points, click the map to get coordinates for a precision GPS drop, and place or drag simobject props directly on the map. In multiplayer, other players in your session appear on the map with live position updates.

🧱

Simobject (Props) Scene Builder

Browse the MSFS simobject catalog — hundreds of default objects, direct user entry, or MSFS 2024 file system scanned simobjects — spanning aircraft, ground vehicles, boats, animals, humans, and landmarks. Spawn any object by map-click or coordinate, rotate its heading, and drag it to reposition. Save and load entire scenes including fire layouts and drawn fire lines, with optional prop-only or fires-only saves. Panel settings are also remembered per aircraft, so each airframe returns to its own configuration.

💬

Session Chat & Coordination

Built-in session chat syncs messages across all connected players. Share your session with an 8-digit code or a QR code linking to the live session browser. Use the live session browser to find active multiplayer sessions to join, or host your own session. Session hosting can be public or private.

🌍

Six Languages

Full UI localization in English, Italian, German, French, Spanish, and Portuguese across every panel, button, and tooltip.

// Version 2

WHAT'S NEWV2

Fire and smoke rebuilt from scratch, fire lines that drift and spot downwind, ground retardant that actually stops them, and a reported-incident feed covering the US, Canada and Europe.

🔥

Fire & Smoke, Rebuilt

Every fire now uses a single parameterised effect, so flame, plume and embers stay in step — and each fire gets its own random variation, so no two fires in a line look identical.

Performance / Balanced / Quality — three genuinely different effect builds, not one effect scaled down. Move the slider and every burning fire restarts with the new build. If you're frame-limited near large fires, start here.FIRES → Fire and Smoke
Flame brightness, flame tint and smoke colour — match the glow to the sim's time of day, and run the fire anywhere from ember red to blue-white with smoke from brightest to black.FIRES → Fire Display / Smoke Color
Fire sound and thermal turbulence — audible fire up close, and low passes over an active fire now get bumpy in proportion to what's burning beneath you.

〰️

Fire Lines

Click and drag on the map to draw a line of fire between two points. It behaves as one unit: it drifts downwind leaving a scorched trail, bows outward as the centre outruns the ends, and throws embers ahead of itself that start new spot fires. Burn marks last from five minutes to four hours, or not at all.

In multiplayer only the host can draw lines; guests see them appear and can fight them.

MAP → Draw Fire Line

🟥

Retardant That Paints the Ground

Red retardant now leaves a visible stain where it lands, and that stain works as a firebreak — a drifting fire line that reaches it stops advancing instead of moving through. Water puts out what's already burning; retardant stops the line getting where you don't want it. Lay it ahead of the fire, not on it.

Drops from any player are visible to everyone, and the host sets the ground lifetime for the whole session so the break behaves identically on every machine.

DROP → Retardant Persistence

🎯

Smarter Drops

Drops per full tank — set how many drops you get before a refill, or switch the tank off entirely.DROP → Liquid Tank
GPS trigger ring — the map now draws the arming radius at true ground scale, so you can see the zone you have to fly through instead of guessing.DROP → GPS Drop
Bucket positioning — hang the bucket correctly on any helicopter with left/right, forward/aft and up/down trim in feet, plus a control for how freely it swings.DROP → Bucket Position

📡

Reported Fire Incident Feed

A new map layer showing real-world wildfires — NIFC / WFIGS for the United States, CWFIS / Natural Resources Canada for Canada, and clustered NASA FIRMS satellite detections for Europe. Click any marker for details: incident name, area, containment, personnel and cause where the agency reports them. Marker colour tracks containment and size scales with the fire.

The European entries are a different kind of data and the popup says so — no equivalent registry exists there, so those markers are satellite heat detections that may be agricultural or industrial, named for the nearest settlement. Where a reported incident has no detection nearby, FS Fire places a fire at that location so you can fly to it and work it.

Fire icons now change colour as you work them, so you can see at a glance which are nearly out and which have barely been touched.MAP → Reported Fire Incident Feed

🎲

Spawning You Control

Fires can now spawn at a random size within a range you set, which makes both single fires and fire lines look far more natural — and in multiplayer the sizes come from a shared seed, so everyone sees the same fire at the same size. A separate distance control sets how far out fires are actually spawned into the sim, trading visible range against object count.

FIRES → Random Size / Fire Load Distance

💾

Settings That Remember

FS Fire now stores your panel settings per aircraft. Set the bucket position for your Huey and the drop options for your CL-415, and each returns to its own configuration on load — automatically, with nothing to switch on. Scenes now capture fire lines alongside your props, so you can build a scenario once and fly it repeatedly.