Settings in X-Plane 11

X-Plane 11 is highly customizable and has numerous options you can turn on and off. Many of the options in General Settings are controls for how realistic the simulator is. Having them on can provide helpful hints that make the sim easier to use or even explain things that go wrong. Check out the video below for a tutorial or scroll down for an overview.

General Settings Overview

Language

In this section, you can change the default language, which will take effect after you restart the simulator. Note that this will also change your language and Plane Maker and Airfoil Maker.

Warnings

This section controls the way on-screen warnings are grouped. You can turn off a variety of warnings here or even disable the main menu at sim start if you want to get directly into a flight.

The Notification Settings button opens a window where you can get even more detailed about what warnings you want to display. This window also allows you to reset the preferences to never show warnings again. 

Flight Model

• You can adjust the number of flight models per frame if needed, but usually 2 per frame is sufficient. 
• You can turn on green boxes on all instruments that can be interacted with in the cockpit here, and you can choose to turn on mouse-over information for these instruments.
• The option to simulate blackout, read out, and hypoxia is on by default. If you forget to turn on pressurization or oxygen, you may start to see the screen darken as you climb due to these settings.
• ATC taxi arrows are the helpful yellow route markings drawn on the ground after you get taxi instructions from ATC. Turn them off for a more realistic experience. 
• Disabling downwind ILSes makes for a more realistic flight experience.
• If you have problems with scenery terrain making airports hard to use, you can disable terrain contours. However, this option is a very blunt tool, and a more nuanced and long-term solution would be to modify the problematic airport in world editor.
• The final check box here is the new experimental flight model option. The flight model changes included in X-Plane 11.30 are off by default unless this option is checked. Using this option gives aircraft developers time to try the changes before we make them official. 

Data

Most of these options dump additional data to the log.text (or to a file in the main X-Plane folder). Here you can also change your preference to send us your anonymous usage data at any time. 

Damage

Here you can change whether flying over speed or over G removes flying surfaces.

Kiosk Mode

You can turn kiosk mode on and off here.

Our Manual

The X-Plane 11 manual is a great online resource for finding answers and solving problems. And best of all, its searchable. Go here and use your browser's find function or the Table of Contents to find more information.