Cities: Skylines II Still Crashing on Launch—Mod Manager Bug Unresolved Since June?

I’m genuinely disappointed with how Cities: Skylines II is handling a persistent crash tied to the Paradox Mods system. I’ve been trying to play the game for weeks, and despite following every official troubleshooting step—including reinstalling, clearing mod cache folders, setting environment variables, and using launch flags like —the game still crashes immediately on launch.

The error is always the same:

[SceneFlow] [FATAL] Object reference not set to an instance of an object

at Colossal.PSI.PdxSdk.PdxSdkPlatform.get_modsRootPath()

From what I can tell, the game is trying to load a mod playset from a nonexistent or malformed cache, and instead of failing gracefully, it throws a fatal . This happens even when mods are explicitly disabled.

What’s frustrating is that Paradox acknowledged this issue back in June and posted steps to resolve it—but those steps don’t work. The problem still exists, and there’s been no patch to fix the underlying logic. I’ve tried everything short of rolling back the game using DepotDownloader, and at this point I’m just tired. I want to play the game, not debug its launcher.

Is anyone else still dealing with this? Has anyone found a workaround that actually works? Or are we just waiting for a proper fix in a future patch