IL-2 Sturmovik: Great Battles has a strong livery community that has spent years creating a wide variety of historical, fictional and personalized skins in the community. As great as all of these skins are, it’s not always easy or enjoyable to decide on a whim to load up a few new custom skins. Now, however, there’s an alternative. Let’s have a look at Haluter’s Skin downloader!

A year in the making

The community team behind Haluter’s Skin Downloader (or HSD) approached me almost a year ago and let me test an earlier version of the downloader. They only had a few skins loaded in and it was still early days for the team as they worked through bugs in the utility. A lot can happen in a year and the team has been quietly building out both the skin collection for launch as well as the utility that supports it.

HSD quite simply is a third party utility that you download and run on your computer. It has an approachable user interface that makes it relatively easy to browse through a wide variety of available skins. You can narrow your view down to just a specific aircraft or tank type or look at the whole list.

The list will let you preview each skin, read through historical and author information, and queue up skins for download. Removing skins that you no longer want is also available and just as easy to do.

The utility is now available for public use and I expect that once skin artists have had a chance to look this over, they will be uploading and submitting their collection to the utility. This could very well be a great one stop shop for many players looking for custom skins that they can easily load up into their IL-2: Great Battles install.

If you want a tutorial on how to use the skin downloader, I-Fly-Central has a video up about the utility and how to make the most of it.

Download now

You can download HSD from this link on the IL-2 forum. If you want to interact with the developer team more directly, join them on their Discord community here.