In this paper we present the fusion advanced studies torus (FAST) plasma scenarios and equilibrium configurations, designed to reproduce the ITER ones (with scaled plasma current) and suitable to fulfil plasma conditions for integrated studies of plasma–wall interaction, burning plasma physics, ITER relevant operation problems and steady state scenarios. The attention is focused on FAST flexibility in terms of both performance and physics that can be investigated: operations are foreseen in a wide range of parameters from high performance H-mode (toroidal field, B _T, up to 8.5 T; plasma current, I _P, up to 8 MA) to advanced tokamak (AT) operation (I _P = 3 MA) as well as full non-inductive current scenario (I _P = 2 MA). The coupled heating power is provided with 30 MW delivered by an ion cyclotron resonance heating system (30–90 MHz), 6 MW by a lower hybrid system (3.7 or 5 GHz) for the long pulse AT scenario, 4 MW by an electron cyclotron resonant heating system (170 GHz − B _T = 6 T) for MHD and localized electron heating control and, eventually, with 10 MW by a negative neutral ion beam (NNBI), which the ports are designed to accommodate. In the reference H-mode scenario FAST preserves (with respect to ITER) fast ion induced as well as turbulence fluctuation spectra, thus addressing the cross-scale couplings issue of micro- to meso-scale physics. The non-inductive scenario at I _P = 2 MA is obtained with 60–70% of bootstrap current and the remaining by LHCD. Predictive simulations of the H-mode scenarios have been performed by means of the JETTO code, using a semi-empirical mixed Bohm/gyro-Bohm transport model. Plasma position and shape control studies are also presented for the reference scenario.