For players who bought the newer simulator expecting its much-improved terrain, ground detail, and lighting to support slow, low-level sightseeing, this is more than a routine activity refresh. Bush Trips were one of the few built-in modes designed around navigation, landmarks, and persistence across a route rather than a single landing challenge or an open-ended Free Flight session. Their absence was conspicuous enough that Microsoft acknowledged in November 2024 that the feature was being reworked before reintroduction.
Sim Update 6, build 1.8.14.0, is rolling out now. The patch also includes broad lighting, systems, aircraft, and Career Mode work, but the restoration of Bush Trips closes one of the more visible feature gaps between the 2020 and 2024 releases.
Bush Trips return after a long rework
A Bush Trip is a sequence of flight legs built around visual navigation and a supplied navlog, commonly using light aircraft in scenic or challenging terrain. Instead of receiving a conventional airline-style route and treating the flight as a point-to-point task, the player works through waypoints and points of interest, often with limited guidance and a reason to look outside the cockpit.
That format made Bush Trips a durable part of the Flight Simulator 2020 activity catalog. They were especially useful for simmers who wanted a curated route without the all-or-nothing commitment of designing a route, selecting airports, choosing an aircraft, and setting up weather from scratch. They also gave Microsoft and Asobo a way to direct players toward world-update scenery and lower-altitude detail that can be easy to miss when flying airport-to-airport at jet cruise levels.
The feature did not make the transition cleanly to Flight Simulator 2024. In a November 2024 discussion on the official Microsoft Flight Simulator forum, Microsoft community manager Jayne “Jummivana” confirmed that Bush Trips were being reworked before being reintroduced. That matters because it establishes that the omission was not simply a hidden menu item, licensing issue, or a matter of users installing the wrong content package: the developer knew the activity type was not ready for the new game.
Sim Update 6 is therefore the delivery of a delayed launch-era promise, not a newly conceived attraction. The distinction is important for existing owners. This is a free simulator update restoring a mode that fans of the prior release reasonably expected to find in the successor.
During the public beta, Microsoft’s release notes warned that several trips were still being tested and were unavailable at that stage. The beta exclusion list included Discover Sweden, North Queensland Coast, Austria – Land of Mountains and Music, Germany’s Coast and the Rhine, The Alpine World of Switzerland, The Baltic Coast of Denmark and Sweden, Wales, Upper Northeast Adriatic Countries, Rijeka to Santorini, and Breckenridge.
Windows Central’s report on the public release says the full collection is now present. Microsoft’s public-facing patch material, however, has not provided a clean, player-facing inventory that confirms each trip by name for the final 1.8.14.0 build. Players looking for a particular route should verify it in Activities after installing the update rather than assuming that a trip which was unavailable in the beta necessarily appears in the same place, with the same aircraft assignment, progression behavior, and briefing presentation as it did in the 2020 simulator.
The practical change is in the Activities menu
The immediate action for PC players is straightforward: update Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, open Activities, and look for Bush Trips there rather than in Free Flight or the World Map. Guided Tours now live in that area as well, consolidating two forms of curated sightseeing that previously sat outside the Career Mode structure.
That placement says something about how the 2024 simulator now treats the mode. Bush Trips are not Career assignments, and they do not appear to be framed as another specialization ladder with economy, reputation, or company-management requirements. They are an activity catalog—an intentional separation that preserves the lower-pressure format longtime users expected.
For people coming from Flight Simulator 2020, the update should also remove the need to improvise with converted plans, community-folder packages, and external navlog tools merely to recreate a first-party sightseeing route. Those workarounds were possible for some technically inclined users, but they were never an equivalent substitute. A converted plan may reproduce a path; it does not necessarily reproduce the authored activity logic, checkpoints, narration, or progress handling that makes a Bush Trip distinct from a saved flight plan.
There is one sensible precaution for advanced PC installations. Microsoft’s beta documentation repeatedly warned that outdated Community folder packages can affect title performance and behavior after a major Sim Update. Anyone who previously installed third-party Bush Trip conversions or activity mods should test the stock trips with those packages temporarily removed or disabled. Otherwise, a problem caused by an old mission package can look like a regression in the returning official content.
The update does not, at least in the published reporting, spell out whether existing completion records from Flight Simulator 2020 migrate to the 2024 activity system. Users should expect to begin the returning activities fresh unless they can see an imported completion state in the new menu. Microsoft has also not announced a separate migration tool for prior Bush Trip saves.
Sim Update 6 also changes the graphics equation
Bush Trips are the headline restoration, but Sim Update 6 arrives with an uneven graphics story depending on which GPU is in the PC. Microsoft Flight Simulator’s final release notes say NVIDIA users receive DLSS 4.5 as the default native upscaler, with Dynamic Frame Generation and in-game VSync support. Windows Central first reported those additions during the early Sim Update 6 beta.
AMD users do not receive the equivalent final upgrade that beta testers briefly had. The release build reverts the simulator’s built-in FSR frame-generation path to FSR 3 because FSR 4 frame generation proved incompatible with rendering across multiple windows. Microsoft says it is working with AMD on a solution for a future Sim Update.
The company’s wording draws an important boundary: this is not simply a benchmark preference or an unannounced delay. The incompatibility involves a multi-window rendering scenario, which can be relevant to cockpit builders, users with pop-out avionics, and anyone who runs the simulator across complicated display arrangements. Those are exactly the users for whom frame generation can be tempting because Flight Simulator’s CPU-heavy workloads can limit smoothness even when a GPU has headroom.
AMD Radeon owners should not spend time hunting for a hidden FSR 4 toggle in Sim Update 6 or treat driver software reporting as proof that the game is using the full FSR 4 frame-generation implementation tested in beta. The simulator’s own release notes say the final build falls back to the FSR 3 implementation used in Sim Update 5.1. That does not remove all Radeon upscaling options, but it does mean the beta’s promised performance feature did not make the shipping build intact.
The contrast is sharp: the update restores a missing activity mode for all players, while its most substantial rendering upgrade lands cleanly only on the NVIDIA side. Microsoft has given no date for an FSR 4 correction.
Lighting and route flying make a better match than before
Sim Update 6 also carries lighting improvements, including work at generic airports that had been called out during the beta cycle. That should be especially noticeable in the kinds of smaller fields and remote routes where Bush Trips tend to begin or end. In earlier builds, night operations at auto-generated airports could feel unfinished because the visual cues needed for arrival, parking, and ground orientation were inconsistent.
The result is a better fit between the restored activity and the 2024 simulator’s strengths. Bush Trips ask players to fly low, fly slowly, and pay attention to terrain and landmarks. Lighting improvements, enhanced scenery, and the newer simulator’s environmental presentation have more value in that setting than they do during a high-altitude cruise where the world is mostly viewed at a distance.
But the return should not be confused with a promise that every legacy trip has been redesigned around every 2024-specific feature. Microsoft has announced the availability of the activity collection, not a ground-up modernization of each route’s authored content. Simmers should judge the new implementation by the essentials: whether a leg launches correctly, checkpoints register, navlogs and route guidance work, and progress survives an interruption.
For now, the concrete result is simpler than the sprawling Sim Update 6 patch notes: Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 once again has an official, built-in way to explore the world one carefully planned leg at a time.
