Flying at night in Microsoft Flight Simulator can often look brighter than reality, with rural roads and isolated highways lit up far beyond what real-world pilots see. MSFS DarkStreets, a lightweight scenery package by developer kiwikat, tackles this long-standing visual issue by removing streetlights outside of urban areas — transforming how night flying feels across multiple world regions.
The project currently covers a vast portion of the globe, including the United States, Canada, and Mexico, as well as Europe, Australia and New Zealand, the Pacific Islands region, and Central America and the Caribbean. Each region is distributed as a separate package, allowing you to install only those you need. According to the developer, work on a South American edition is already being investigated.
Unlike typical lighting mods, DarkStreets does not add new assets or replace textures. Instead, it uses precisely generated exclusion polygons to disable rural and suburban streetlights based on real-world data. The result is a more authentic night environment where only towns, cities, and developed areas are illuminated. The change enhances immersion for pilots who enjoy realistic IFR operations, bush flying, or night VFR navigation.
To achieve this, kiwikat built the project using a combination of Python, ArcGIS Pro, and QGIS, alongside open data from sources such as Natural Earth, OpenStreetMap, US Census Bureau, CORINE Land Cover, and others. While much of the work was automated, thousands of polygons were manually refined to improve accuracy — particularly for small villages and complex coastal regions.
Version 0.4.3 introduces two new regions: the Pacific Islands and Central America + Caribbean, alongside a rebuild of the North American dataset to better align with regional borders.
MSFS DarkStreets is available as freeware on Flightsim.to. As with all community-developed projects, you are encouraged to support kiwikat’s work by considering a donation.