What's on the official Workshop
Steam Workshop is the only official channel for sharing builds, objects and Paras.
Whole lots shared as .para files — browse before placing, subscribe to auto-update.
Single rooms you can preview and drop into an existing build.
Community furniture and colour variants that ship with a build upload.
Shared Paras and appearance presets for your next household.
We only list official Steam Workshop content categories here. Third-party files (Nexus, manual downloads) are unofficial and unsupported — treat them with care and back up your saves. Script mods are not planned at the moment, per the official FAQ.
Open the full Workshop list →Upload & share your house
Save your build to the Lot Library, set a cover under 1 MB, write the listing and publish it to the Steam Workshop — the creator-side loop in twelve steps.
Download & place houses
Subscribe on Steam, let lots land in your library with cloud icons, buy an empty plot and place the house — the consumer-side loop, pitfalls included.
How to install mods in Paralives
Step-by-step Steam Workshop and manual Nexus/CurseForge installs, plus fixes for mods that won't show up. Since patch 0.1.9 the in-game Mods menu has a tag filter and a search bar.
Custom content (CC)
What CC means in Paralives, where to find it, and how to create your own objects with Blender and the in-game mod editor.
Which mods to actually install
The 15 most-subscribed quality-of-life mods, each with its author, Workshop link and the date we checked it. Five of the ten most-subscribed items on the whole Workshop fix the game's controls rather than add content.
Mods replaced by patches
Appearance editing, bulk mod toggles and more custom-image surfaces are built in now — what each patch absorbed, and which mods are still worth installing.
Mods not working?
Troubleshooting by symptom, each paired with the patch that fixed it — the Reimporting assets freeze, mods missing when the game sits off the system drive, the old 50-mod cap, and the studio's own way of finding the culprit.
Step by step
How to place a Workshop house or lot
You subscribed to a house and your town looks exactly the same. That is the correct outcome: a Workshop download is content the game now has, not a building it has put down. These seven steps cover the whole route from the Subscribe button to a finished house standing on a lot you own.
Written against Early Access 0.1.9 from the official patch notes, the game's own in-game Help guide and the studio's troubleshooting post. Where those sources run out, the list at the bottom of this section says so instead of guessing.
- 1
Subscribe — that is the download
Open the item's page on the Paralives Steam Workshop and click Subscribe, either in the Steam client or in a browser. There is no separate file to fetch and no archive to unzip: subscribing is the instruction that makes Steam download it. You can browse the Workshop without owning the game, but nothing reaches your machine without a Steam account, and every item is free — Steam's content rules forbid selling anything there.
- 2
Steam keeps the files — leave them there
Subscribed items land in Steam's own Workshop content folder for Paralives, not in your game install and not in the folder manual mods use. Steam manages it. Unsubscribing is how you remove an item, and deleting files by hand only makes Steam download them again; when the author updates the build, it updates on your machine too. The path matters in exactly one situation — the game will not start — and our mods-not-working page lists it with the rest.
Where Steam puts subscribed items (Windows)<Steam library>\steamapps\workshop\content\1118520 - 3
Switch it on in the in-game Mods menu
Start Paralives through Steam and open the Mods menu on the title screen. Subscribing and enabling are two different things: an item can download and still sit switched off. Since patch 0.1.5 one button toggles the whole list. Since patch 0.1.4 the game shows a "Loading mods…" screen while it works, so a slow start is not a freeze. If the game never reaches that menu, the studio's own route is right-click the game in Steam, then Properties, Workshop, Locally Enabled Items.
- 4
Check which of the three kinds of item you downloaded
Paralives shares three kinds of Workshop upload and only one of them is a building. Patch 0.1.4 names all three in a single line, telling creators to re-tag their "mods, households and lots". Furniture, clothing and swatches join the Build Mode catalogue and carry a small cloud badge marking them as Workshop content. A household is a family of Paras, not a house. The lot or house tag is the one that arrives as a finished build you can place.
ModpacksMods and custom contentObjects, clothing, swatches and gameplay tweaks. Once enabled they show up in the Build Mode catalogue or the Paramaker — never as a building on the ground.
HouseholdsHouseholdsA pre-made family of Paras. The Help guide describes households being saved to the Library to be shared on the Workshop and loaded into another save file.
HousesLots and housesFinished builds — whole houses and single rooms. This is the one you place on a lot, and the reason steps 6 and 7 exist.
The three labels above are Steam's own Workshop tags, as listed on the game's wiki; patch 0.1.4 calls the same three things mods, households and lots.
- 5
Subscribe to the mods the house was built with
The step people skip, and the usual reason a placed house arrives with bare shelves. A Workshop build is often furnished with community objects, and the creators of the houses the studio has featured say it on the item page: download every required mod before you place the lot. Paralives' modding tools cannot chain dependencies, so subscribing to the house does not subscribe you to anything inside it. Work down the list on the item page and subscribe to each one yourself.
- 6
Own the lot you want it on — that part is Live Mode
Buy the destination lot first. The game's Help guide is blunt about the order of operations: to enter Build Mode, make sure you have purchased a lot first. The town map is a zoomed-out Live Mode view, and it is where lots are bought, sold and managed. Do the land part there, then switch. The build goes down on the lot you are standing on, so the lot you pick now is the lot the house lands on.
- 7
Open the lot library and place the build
The Library is where Paralives keeps shareable content: the Help guide describes households being saved there to go out to the Steam Workshop, the patch notes call the screen the lot library menu, and patch 0.1.4 put the official collab house into it. Open that menu on your lot and choose the build. It drops down like a stamp, furnished, with the creator's colour choices attached. One rule refuses most attempts: since patch 0.1.6 a library lot bigger than your actual lot space cannot be placed at all.
What you download is a finished build, not a blueprint
Nothing on the Workshop comes as a plan the game can read. Paralives has no blueprint tool and no floor plan import, so you get the house standing, furnished and in the creator's colours. Walk through it, tear out rooms, sell what you do not want, or leave it exactly as built. If you would rather build from a real floor plan, that is a different workflow: lay the image flat on a rug on the lot and trace the walls over it.
Read the floor plan and blueprint guideLive Mode or Build Mode?
Two halves of the same question, split because the game splits them.
Buy the land, manage the household
Zooming out opens the town map, where you click a lot to read its info, buy it, sell it, or move and split your household. Nothing in the patch notes or the Help guide puts a building on the ground from inside Live Mode. It is the part of the workflow where you decide which lot the house is going onto.
Place the build, then edit it
Build Mode is where content is placed and edited, and it needs a lot you already own. Items come out of the catalogue here, and the lot menu that saves and places library lots is the one our move-house guide walks through from the town map. Once a downloaded build is down it is an ordinary lot: move walls, sell furniture, repaint.
What nobody has published
The steps above stop where the sources stop. These four things are stated as fact on other sites. We found no official or reproducible source for any of them, so they stay questions rather than instructions.
- Whether a subscribed house appears in the same lot library menu as the lots you saved yourself. Three official fragments point that way — the Help guide's Library-to-Workshop sentence, patch 0.1.4's lot library menu, patch 0.1.6's "Placing Lots from Library" — and every guide on this site already works from it, but the studio has never printed the click path and we have not re-checked it by hand on 0.1.9.
- Whether the lot library menu opens from the town-map lot panel or from inside Build Mode. Our move-house guide documents the town-map route; no patch note gives the screen order.
- Whether a build can be rotated as it is placed. Players report turning houses by re-placing them from the Library, and our move-house guide flags the same gap; nothing official describes rotation during placement.
- What happens to a lot that already has a house on it when you drop a downloaded build there, and what becomes of the furniture already standing. The collision rules are undocumented everywhere we looked.
Keep reading
Upload & share your house
The reverse trip: save your lot to the library and publish it for other players to place.
How to install mods
The full Workshop and manual-install walkthrough, including what to do when nothing appears in game.
Mods not working
Symptoms matched to the patch that fixed them, plus the studio's own way of finding the culprit.
Build from a floor plan
Why nothing downloads as a blueprint, and the rug method that gives you a traceable plan instead.
Move house and place a saved build
The town-map workflow: buy a lot, move the household, place a lot you saved to the Library.
Workshop houses and lots — questions
The wording people actually search with. Where another guide on this site already answers something at more length, the answer points there instead of repeating itself.
- Can you download houses in Paralives?
- Yes, and free. Whole houses, single rooms and households go up on the Steam Workshop and come down with one click: subscribe, and the game has the content next time you open it. You need the Steam version of Paralives and a Steam account. Nothing on the Workshop costs money, because Steam does not allow commercial content there. What you download is a finished build rather than a plan.
- How do you place a Workshop house?
- Subscribe on Steam, switch the item on in the in-game Mods menu, buy the destination lot from the town map, then open the lot library menu on that lot and choose the build. It lands on the lot you are standing on, furnished and in the creator's colours. If it refuses to go down, the build is almost certainly bigger than the lot — patch 0.1.6 made library lots that exceed your lot space unplaceable.
- Where do downloaded lots go?
- Two places, both automatic. On disk, Steam writes subscribed items into its own Workshop content folder for Paralives and you should leave them there. In the game the build becomes Library content, the same place your own saved lots and households live — how those two meet on screen is the part the studio has never documented. Unlike manual files from third-party sites, there is no folder for you to copy anything into.
- Can you download floor plans or blueprints for Paralives?
- Not as plans. The Workshop shares finished builds; nothing imports a drawing, and Early Access 0.1.9 has no blueprint tool. Either place a downloaded house and remodel it, or save the plan as an image, lay it on a rug in Build Mode and trace the walls over it. Our floor plan guide covers that end to end.
- Why is my downloaded house not showing up?
- Four candidates. Steam has not finished the download. The item is subscribed but switched off in the Mods menu. The game has not re-scanned since, so quit completely and relaunch. Or the build is larger than the lot space you own, which patch 0.1.6 blocks outright. If a whole set of items has vanished at once rather than one house, that is a different symptom and the mods-not-working guide covers it.
Mod health center
Build 0.1.9Whether mods still work after a patch is the first question every modded save asks. This board tracks the current build, Workshop activity, and every patch that touched the mod system — with sources.
Patches that touched the mod system
- 0.1.92026-10-08Added a tag filter and a search bar to the Mods menu, fixed one culprit behind mod lists going empty — the studio names several — plus the brief freeze when opening the menu. The in-game “Browse Steam Workshop” button now uses the current tag labels.
- 0.1.62026-07-16Localization and translation fixes — if you run a community translation mod, re-check it against the updated strings.
- 0.1.52026-07-02Save-system overhaul: new saves drop from ~500MB to ~30MB, three rolling autosaves, Steam Cloud sync. Modded saves benefit too — back up before switching.
- 0.1.42026-06-18A 'Loading mods…' screen now shows when launching with mods (previously the game looked frozen). Creators also get better Workshop tags.
- 0.1.32026-06-06Fixed the issue that capped a game at 50 Steam Workshop mods; the in-game font now covers more characters so translation mods can ship more languages.
Steam Workshop
One-click subscribe. Items appear in your in-game library the next time you boot. Updates flow automatically. Unsubscribe to uninstall.
Manual installs
Some sites host files outside Steam. These are unofficial and unsupported — script mods are not planned at the moment per the official FAQ. If you experiment anyway: unzip into Mods/, disable everything on a crash, and always back up saves first.
CC stays free
Under the current community guidelines, creators are not allowed to paywall custom content. Patreon tipping is fine; pay-to-download is not.