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XEarthLayer v0.5.0

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@github-actions github-actions released this 01 Nov 23:00
· 3 commits to main since this release
Immutable release. Only release title and notes can be modified.
v0.5.0
7af5d5f

XEarthLayer 0.5.0 brings macOS support, night lighting, a rebuilt scenery world and a package manager.

If you are upgrading from 0.4.x, read Upgrading from 0.4.x before you install any scenery. The rebuilt world replaces the old one, and the two must not be installed together.

Platform Download
Debian, Ubuntu (glibc 2.34 or newer) xearthlayer_0.5.0-1_amd64.deb
Fedora 44 or newer xearthlayer-0.5.0-1.fc44.x86_64.rpm
Arch and derivatives aur-package.zip (PKGBUILD and .SRCINFO; unpack it and run makepkg -si)
Other Linux x86_64 (glibc 2.34 or newer) xearthlayer-v0.5.0-x86_64-linux.tar.gz
macOS, Apple Silicon xearthlayer-v0.5.0-arm64-macos.pkg, Homebrew (below), or xearthlayer-v0.5.0-arm64-macos.tar.gz

There is no Intel Mac build. The xearthlayer-publish downloads are the tool for building scenery packages, which you only need if you publish your own.

What is new

macOS. XEarthLayer now runs natively on Apple Silicon, with X-Plane and scenery working as they do on Linux. Every build is signed and notarized by Apple. Thanks to @dlicudi for leading the port.

Night lighting. Ortho scenery used to leave cities dark at night wherever autogen lights did not reach. XEarthLayer now generates lit textures on your machine, from a night recipe in each package, NASA's measurements of how bright the ground really is, and the lit art in your own X-Plane installation. Some neighbourhoods are lit with white LED street lighting rather than sodium orange, at a share and colour temperature set by region. It is on by default; see night.enabled and night.brightness in the configuration reference.

A rebuilt world. The scenery library is now 17 regions built from scratch with night recipes, about 161 GB if you install the whole planet. Package archives are smaller too, because DSF files are now compressed the way Laminar compresses its own scenery.

A package manager. xearthlayer packages opens a full-screen manager with Local, Library, Progress and Settings tabs. Downloads no longer wait for installs, so a batch takes about as long as its downloads. Region codes can be shortened: xearthlayer packages install na-canada eu-west installs every package beneath those codes. Ctrl+C cancels cleanly, and a package being replaced keeps its old version.

SimHeaven X-World Pro. With packages.xworld_pro on, XEarthLayer detects which continents X-World Pro covers, leaves out its own overlays there, and checks your scenery_packs.ini order on every start. It advises only and never edits the file. See x-world-pro.md.

X-Plane comes first. Prefetch now runs in its own lane with its own workers and download connections, so a backlog of prefetch work can no longer sit in front of a tile X-Plane is waiting for. While X-Plane is waiting on a tile to be generated, prefetch starts nothing new. A timed-out job now stops downloading at once and gives back its capacity, which used to leak away over a session.

A faster start. run no longer sizes every installed package before the dashboard opens, and after a package change the scenery index rebuilds in about 17 seconds rather than over four minutes with the whole world installed.

A better dashboard. A Status pane shows X-Plane's frame rate and what is actually running this session: the texture encoder, night lighting and X-World Pro. The prefetch section shows one clear state and how much of its capacity is in use, and the Scenery System section shows how long X-Plane waited for tiles.

The CHANGELOG has the full list.

Install

Close X-Plane and stop any running XEarthLayer first.

Debian and Ubuntu: sudo apt install ./xearthlayer_0.5.0-1_amd64.deb

Fedora: sudo dnf install ./xearthlayer-0.5.0-1.fc44.x86_64.rpm

Other Linux, from the tarball:

tar xzf xearthlayer-v0.5.0-x86_64-linux.tar.gz
mkdir -p ~/.local/bin
mv xearthlayer ~/.local/bin/

macOS: XEarthLayer needs macFUSE, including its one-time approval. The macOS guide walks through it. Then choose one:

  • Installer package. Open xearthlayer-v0.5.0-arm64-macos.pkg and follow the Installer. It puts xearthlayer in /usr/local/bin, and installs without a network connection.
  • Homebrew. brew install --cask xearthlayer/tap/xearthlayer. If macFUSE is already installed from its own installer, add --skip-cask-deps.
  • Tarball. Unpack it and move xearthlayer to ~/.local/bin. The first run needs a network connection, because macOS checks the notarization once.

Then check it: xearthlayer --version should print 0.5.0.

New to XEarthLayer? Run xearthlayer setup. When it finishes it offers to open the package manager, where you install the regions you fly (below).

Upgrading from 0.4.x

The first command you run copies your config.ini to the platform's standard location (~/.config/xearthlayer/ on Linux) and may ask you to confirm. Accepting is safe: nothing else is moved, and the old config.ini is kept, so 0.4.x still works if you go back to it. The copy reads the rebuilt library, and the message says so; the old file keeps the library 0.4.x can use. Then:

xearthlayer config upgrade

Remove every old package before installing anything new:

xearthlayer packages remove --all --force
xearthlayer packages remove --all --type overlay --force
xearthlayer packages list    # should report no packages installed

If you had no overlays, the second line prints Error: Package manager error: No overlay packages are installed, which is harmless. There is nothing to clean up by hand in Custom Scenery.

Two other changes to know about:

  • xearthlayer publish is now its own program, xearthlayer-publish, with the same subcommands, in its own package.
  • prefetch.mode is gone: prefetch is on or off by prefetch.enabled. A configuration that switched prefetch off still has it off, and xearthlayer config upgrade tidies it up.

Coming from a 0.5.0 alpha, beta or rc? Install this build; your packages carry over. On Homebrew, leave the pre-release channel first with brew uninstall --cask xearthlayer@prerelease. From an alpha, also run xearthlayer config upgrade.

Install the regions you fly

xearthlayer packages

Press 2 for the Library, move with the arrow keys, mark regions with Space, press i and confirm with y. Press 3 to watch the downloads and installs. ? lists every key, and q quits. To have each ortho install bring its region's overlays, which is off by default, set packages.auto_install_overlays on the Settings tab.

Region Covers Download
NA-USA-BERMUDA-BAHAMAS Contiguous US, Alaska, Hawaii, Bermuda, the Bahamas, Turks and Caicos 14.1 GB
NA-MEXICO-CENTRAL Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean 4.5 GB
NA-CANADA-WEST Canada west of 95° W 10.2 GB
NA-CANADA-EAST Canada east of 95° W 13.2 GB
NA-GREENLAND Greenland 0.8 GB
SA-WEST Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, the Guianas 9.2 GB
SA-EAST Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, the Falklands 8.8 GB
EU-WEST Europe west of Russia, Iceland, Scandinavia, the Mediterranean 16.1 GB
EU-EAST European Russia west of the Urals 3.7 GB
AF-NORTH North and West Africa 7.3 GB
AF-SOUTH Central, East and Southern Africa 9.1 GB
AS-INDIA-MIDDLE-EAST-HIMALAYAN Middle East, Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent 16.8 GB
AS-CHINA-MONGOLIA China and Mongolia 18.5 GB
AS-ASIA-PACIFIC Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Southeast Asia, the Philippines 11.6 GB
AS-RUSSIA-CENTRAL Siberia from the Urals to Lake Baikal 4.8 GB
AS-RUSSIA-EAST The Russian Far East 6.4 GB
OC-AUSTRALIA-NZ-PACIFIC Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific islands 5.5 GB

Sizes are download sizes. Then start streaming:

xearthlayer run

Known issues

FUSE read counts on the dashboard are low on macOS. macOS serves repeat reads of a texture from its own cache, so XEarthLayer only sees the first one. Nothing else depends on that count.

Saving a setting rewrites config.ini from its template. Comments you added to the file by hand are lost. The values are kept.

Antarctica is not in the library yet.

Credits

Night lighting is generated from NASA's VIIRS nighttime lights:

NASA VIIRS Land Science Investigator-led Processing System. (2025). VIIRS/JPSS1 Lunar BRDF-Adjusted Nighttime Lights Yearly L3 Global 15 arc second Linear Lat Lon Grid Dataset. NASA Level 1 and Atmosphere Archive and Distribution System Distributed Active Archive Center. Date Accessed: 2026-10-16

Assets 14
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