How does scenery order work

1 hour ago, bobcat999 said:

There are two ways of doing it.  One is by manually re-naming / ordering the folders in the community folder.  The folders are loaded into MSFS from the community folder in alphabetical order, and with folders loaded last taking precedence (thus the Z- in front of folder names to give them a higher priority),  Basically, if they load last, they over-write any other conflicting data loaded earlier, so they take precedence.  It is possible to use X-, Y-, Z-, ZZ-, etc. to set your order, but normally a simple Z- in front of the folder name will set it to load last and take precedence.  I have never seen more than one clash. 

An example might be loading an improvement mod for an aircraft, and then loading a 'better cameras' file. The better cameras may need a Z- in front to load last, otherwise the standard cameras from the improvement mod would take precedence.
So load order would be the standard aircraft, then the improvement mod, then the cameras over the top of that. 

If the basic aircraft folder loaded last (say an aircraft from flightsim.to in the community folder), you would see its files would immediately over-write the improvement mod and camera files you dropped in there as well. 
The Official folder also loads before the community folder by the way (say for the default C-172), that is how the mod files work, by loading any mods over the top from the Community folder afterwards.

I use this method as it is easy to see your load order using Windows Explorer, and you can change things before going into MSFS.

The other way is to use the package reorder tool within MSFS.  I have never used this method.  This is where they use 0, 1, 2 etc.

Thanks Bob, nicely explained, appreciated. 

Edited December 11, 20232 yr by Rockliffe