Saving Your Key Mappings in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020

The latest version of Microsoft Flight Simulator came out a couple weeks ago, and needless to say it’s been something I have thoroughly enjoyed ever since. But there was a problem for me — and one I couldn’t find any information about online. So let me tell you about how to move your key bindings from one computer to another.

I had built the computer I was playing the new version of Microsoft Flight Simulator on in 2010, and the components just weren’t up to the task. It ran the old FSX just fine, but this latest edition was simply too much for the aging Intel Core i7 930 to handle. I needed to upgrade the whole thing.

Some of you may already be anticipating the issue. The new MFS is slick and cool and recognized my Thrustmaster joystick and throttle right out of the box, but as with all flight simulators there is some significant tweaking and adjusting that needed to happen to get all the keys where I intuitively thought they should go. This process had taken the better part of an hour, and I didn’t want to go through that all again on the new computer.

In the old FSX game there was a way you could export your key mappings to a file and re-import them into the new game. But no matter how hard I looked online, I couldn’t find any information about whether this was the case with the new version as well. I finally resigned myself to the idea that I might need to re-map everything, thinking on the positive side that at least this time I understood how the mapping functionality worked.

This is actually where things get a little cool, and I gotta give Microsoft some kudos for the experience they designed.

I had previously logged into MFS using my Xbox account on the old computer. And once everything was re-installed in the new computer, the moment I logged in again with that same account everything was back just as I had left it. The key bindings were the same, the preferences were the same… even the history of airports I had flown into was preserved.

So for those worried about moving their Microsoft Flight Simulator key bindings to a new computer, don’t fear — as long as you sign in with your Xbox account, everything should sync properly.

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