First things first, you're going to want to make sure before we start off that all of your Imperator Documents are in the same folder. I recommend the folder that has all of the other Paradox games documents (if applicable). For me, this was my OneDrive Documents folder. The mod files will be downloaded and stored in a different documents folder (unless there's some other issue that I haven't had). For me, the mod files downloaded and were stored in "C:/Users/%username%/Documents/Paradox Interactive" while the rest of my files were stored in "C:/users/%username%/OneDrive/Documents/Paradox Interactive". You want to copy the Paradox Interactive folder from the first location into the Documents folder in the second location. It is ok to overwrite existing files.

Once you've got your files consolidated, you've now got to tell the launcher where to find those files. If you try to launch the game without doing this step, your mods may get stuck activated or deactivated and you won't be able to change their setting, despite ticking it in the launcher.

To find your launcher settings json, look in the game's root folder, i.e., the game install directory in Steam. Don't open the launcher folder like you'd think, but open the "game" folder. This is where you'll find your file. Now, this is where it gets scary, but not unduly complicated. If you've got a json file editor program, I'd recommend using that. If not, there are some simple sites available for editing json files. You just need to upload, edit, and redownload the file. A good site for this is jsoneditoronline.org










In this site, you want to look for line 6: game data path. Here you will copy the path of the Imperator folder. The easiest way to do that is to copy the path and exclude the username segment. (Copy everything after your username). Make sure your slashes are forward slashes and not back slashes. It should look like line 6 in my screenshot above. Once everything looks good, click the arrow in the middle to transfer it into the downloadable file. Download, drag, drop, and overwrite the old file. Once you're certain you've got that all done, you should be good to go. Mods will now download to the proper folder and you shouldn't have any issues activating and deactivating mods.

Update: As it turns out, you may need to repeat this process when the game updates and when you install new mods(first step only for new mods). This issue is really annoying, I agree. And we definitely need Paradox to fix it. Thanks guys.