I always will have a soft spot for a developer that puts together a project not just to do the project but because they are personally driven to make it. In other words, a labour of love. That’s what CA21 Limberlost Ranch by Emerald Scenery Designs appears to be and I wanted to take a look at the scenery package and report on it here. So let’s dig in!

The background

I first became aware of Emerald Scenery Designs a couple of years ago when I stumbled onto the collection of freeware and payware Alaskan scenery. I ended up doing a complete series with the mix of scenery and the developer has become something of a legend within the bush plane scenery world for their excellent, and freely available, Emerald Scenery Designs asset pack.

Limberlost Ranch, as the product description indicates, is based on another scenery pack released years ago. for FSX and P3D. KBLU Blue Canyon-Nyack Airport was a pack of three airports including CA21 and this is what drew Emerald Scenery Designs to work on this project.

The project has been in the works for 4 years, on and off, and uses a bunch of different technology to make it come alive. And alive it does feel! What is it all about? Let’s have a look!

Bush strip with style

CA21 Limberlost Ranch is a private airstrip located north of Sacramento California. Surrounded by hills, deep valleys and other landscape features, the airstrip is scenic and located in a beautiful area to explore within the sim.

The airstrip itself is bushplane style with a mostly grass (with a small asphalt second near the hangar) field that has a significant slope up at the end. It’s not the most difficult approach I’ve flown in the sim but it is a decent enough challenge if you’re flying some of the lower powered airplanes. You’ll be fine in a Cessna 185F, or a Zlin Norden, Wilga, A-32 or a RANS-6S. Bring in something with less power and you may be dealing with a bit more of a challenge. Either way, its a pretty fun strip to arrive into or depart from.

There are a lot of little features here too which draw on both the specifics of the scenery and also on the Emerald Scenery assets. The assets provide the grasses, vegetation, and even smaller details like the insects flying around over the flowers. You can look very closely at nearly every aspect of this scenery and it will show you even more detail. It’s really outstanding in that sense.

The hangar itself is quite a cool space. You can spawn in it or park in it after a flight. Its got its own lights and there are plenty of little details around and inside of it. As a kind of “Easter Egg” bonus, there’s a kit-build Pietenpol Air Camper parked inside. It’s a future airplane project from the same developer.

The ranch area at the end of the runway also has a ton of details. On foot you can walk into the ranch and have a look around. Most of the rooms have a lot of detail. It holds up incredibly well at close range too. So do features like the pool with floatys in it that move with the wind. The water itself has a parallax animation system that makes it look like real water. Again… close up it really impresses.

There is a house at the other end of the strip. It doesn’t have the same interior space that the ranch does but it is still kinda fun to walk around.

There are other little details like a fountain at the other end of the airstrip sprays water and has its own sound effects. The hangar door opens when you approach. There’s a fox and a wild boar that roam the airstrip. A horse moves around in a pen near the ranch. At night, even the outdoor lights have their own buzzing sounds. It’s very immersive.

Does it fit your scenery niche?

There’s such a vast array of scenery types in MSFS. You have entire city-scapes the enhance the visual of a large metro area, you have airports big and small, and we’ve even seen companies like Orbx do Jurassic park inspired dinosaur parks. This is firmly in the bushplane scenery category but with a fun

CA21 Limberlost is $14.99 USD which is a bit more than some of the other Emerald Scenery Design packs which tend to be around $10 USD. It is a bigger area than some of those packs and it has even more detail than they do too. It’s obviously quite the effort that has been put in to provide for an immersive experience all around and that is going to be quite valuable for some folks.

If you like to fly somewhere, shut down, walk around, and take in the sights. This is going to be a good one. If you fly somewhere just to get somewhere, this may not be as appealing as the extra details aren’t really going to show through as you fly overhead. Though you may still appreciate starting or ending in the hangar.

What some of Emerald Scenery Design’s projects benefit from is being located near other scenery airports. The collection of Alaskan airstrips, for example, really benefits from being all located in an area that you can realistically fly to and from. Right now, Limberlost Ranch is on its own, though you can fly to and from Lake Tahoe Airport which really isn’t that far away and is included in the sim scenery by default. If Emerald Scenery Designs returns to the area and does a couple of other nearby airstrips, ala the originating FSX/P3D scenery pack, I think that might benefit the project on the whole too.

What you do get is an extremely immersive scenery pack that holds up at long distances, up close, and that provides a fun and semi-challenging place to land or takeoff from. It’s definitely fun!

The scenery is available for both MSFS 2020 and 2024 from the Emerald Scenery Design website, on the Marketplace and from the Orbx store. You can also do a free trial or rental through the Marketplace. It’s $14.99 USD if you want to buy it. Learn more here!