Exit Seam entirely.

Your save games will be in your Documents/Banished/Save folder.
They're simply named Save1 Save2 etc etc, and can be sorted by time and date, so you'll have to find the saves you want to remove based on that.

Once you've tossed out those saves, go to Steam/SteamApps/common/Banished/Windata and throw away all the files that end in .pkm : they are the mods' files.

Restart Steam, go to the workshop for Banished from the Steam App, and unsubscribe everything.

Launching Banished should work, and Steam should no longer try to redownload the broken mods. If you still get told that the application is already running, that's an issue between Steam and some games, and it's "fixed" with a computer restart. (There are probably other ways, but it's the simplest)


When it comes to picking mods, pay attention to the publication date. Anything published in the workshop before mid 2017 was made with a previous version of the modkit, for the previous version of Banished. Those mods might have issues with the last patch, ranging from issues with flags that prevent your people from storing or using goods where they should, to complete crashes.

When installing mods, after you've sorted them in your modlist, you get an automatic reload when you confirm the changes. Once that reload is done, take the time to entirely close Banished and restart it before you start playing a new town.
That extra "quit entirely and restart" step will force the game to correctly commit the modlist changes to memory and prevent future crashes when you try to quit your town.
It's a reflex to acquire to avoid future nightmares: any change to the modlist = confirm-autoreload + manual restart.

Thank you so much! It worked!

Happy Banishing :)

Sometimes verifying files in Steam helps.... but didn't for me. I had to do a complete wipe/reinstall to fix the crashes. It's really time to delete a LOT of old workshop files that just don't seem to currently work (even if they state they're 1.7 compliant)