Paradox Interactive folder filling up my onedrive

[JesseBlitz]

So the past few days ive been looking into what is filling up my onedrive and it seems to be that paradox leaves their shadercache (which for me is now 1gb bc I play 4 of their games) which is annoying bc now I am forced to give them 1/5th of my onedrive while I use onedrive for personal stuff, is it safe to just move my paradox folder to my normal documents folder?

[Gianfilippo]

I have a similar issue: as I play the game on two PCs, and they need different graphical settings, I needed to move the game files out of OneDrive, so I found this:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/394360/discussions/0/3004430610117174368/#c3004430610120595430

"AndrewT:
Different location for save files and screenshots

By default, the game puts the save files and screenshots into your Documents folder (see above). If you would prefer them to be kept in a different location, you can change this. Here is how:

Go to the location of the actual game files (where the executable is). Here, manually create a plain text file named userdir.txt. In this text file, put the path of where you would like the game to put save files and screenshots, e.g. D:\Games\HOI4User\. (You can delete the folder in My Documents and restart the game, it will create its files in the new location.)

IMPORTANT: Before you do this, backup your save games, screenshots, etc, so that nothing is lost!"

[Gianfilippo]

Originally posted by Gianfilippo:

I have a similar issue: as I play the game on two PCs, and they need different graphical settings, I needed to move the game files out of OneDrive, so I found this:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/394360/discussions/0/3004430610117174368/#c3004430610120595430

"AndrewT:
Different location for save files and screenshots

By default, the game puts the save files and screenshots into your Documents folder (see above). If you would prefer them to be kept in a different location, you can change this. Here is how:

Go to the location of the actual game files (where the executable is). Here, manually create a plain text file named userdir.txt. In this text file, put the path of where you would like the game to put save files and screenshots, e.g. D:\Games\HOI4User\. (You can delete the folder in My Documents and restart the game, it will create its files in the new location.)

IMPORTANT: Before you do this, backup your save games, screenshots, etc, so that nothing is lost!"

Of course, I didn't read that same thread to the end, the real fix is in the last message:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/394360/discussions/0/3004430610117174368/#c3004430610122193140

"Go in to the game files in steam and find launcher-settings.json. Open it with your choice of text editor, I use Notepad ++. Find the part that says "gameDataPath", and next to it it should say something like "%USER_DOCUMENTS%/Paradox Interactive/Hearts of Iron 4". Find the directory of where you want to store it (for me, it is E:\Saves\HOI4). Replace %USER_DOCUMENTS%/Paradox Interactive/Hearts of Iron 4 with your directory, and make sure it is still within the quotation marks. The final step is to replace all the backslashes in your directory with forward slashes. Now save the document, and it should work!"

[Wayfinder]

I found both steps (as laid out in the above messages^) to move all files to the new folder!
1. Adding the userdir.txt file to provide the new folder
2. Modifying the launcher-settings.json to refer to the new folder

It also seems to work with the other major Paradox 4X games too.