Running the Game

Running the Game

Every way to start the game lives in one place: the Run button in the editor title bar, on any script or .gui file.

Click it and the game starts in debug mode. Open its dropdown and you get the other two entries.

Entry	What it does
Launch Game (debug mode)	-debug_mode -develop: debug tooltips, the console, and live reload of files you save
Launch Map Editor	The game's map editor, on games that have one
Launch with Options…	A quick pick of every preset the active game offers, plus a free-form option box

The same three sit in the command palette as Paradox: Launch Game (debug mode), Paradox: Launch Map Editor and Paradox: Launch with Options….

Picking Custom options… in the third one opens an input box prefilled with -debug_mode -develop. Type space-separated options; empty launches vanilla. It is a one-off. For a set you want to keep, write a launch configuration (below).

Launching goes through the Steam client, as a steam://run/<appid>//<options>/ URL, so Steam has to be installed and running. The toolkit never touches the game executable itself. A notification confirms what started with which options, says when -develop will reload your saved scripts live, and offers a Watch error.log button so the game's own script errors land in your Problems panel as squiggles while you play.

Run and Debug configurations

Behind the button sits a run type called paradox-game. Press F5 with no launch.json and the workspace's game starts in debug mode.

The Run and Debug panel's dropdown lists the presets for the active game without any setup:

Preset	Options	CK3	Vic3	EU5
Launch (debug mode)	-debug_mode -develop	yes	yes	yes
Map Editor	-mapeditor	yes	yes	no
Continue Last Save (debug mode)	-debug_mode -develop -continuelastsave	yes	yes	no
Skip to 1066 Lobby (debug mode)	-debug_mode -develop -skip	yes	no	no
Benchmark (automated 1.5y run)	-benchmark	yes	no	no
Launch (vanilla, no options)	none	yes	yes	yes

The list is per game, not a shared menu with dead entries: EU5 offers debug mode and vanilla, and its Run dropdown has no Map Editor row at all. Running Paradox: Launch Map Editor from the palette on a game without one says so instead of launching something broken.

The per-game flags in that table were checked as literals in the game's own executable rather than taken off a forum post. CK3's -skip is the exception: it has no string literal to find, and comes from Paradox's documented launch options.

Nothing is debugged here. The game cannot be stepped through from VS Code, so the run type starts the game and ends the session immediately. Breakpoints in script files do nothing.

launch.json, for the sets you use every day

Run and Debug → create a launch.json file → Paradox Game (launch via Steam) writes the active game's presets out as real configurations you can edit. Add your own with the snippets (Ctrl+Space inside the configurations array):

• Paradox: Launch game (debug mode)
• Paradox: Play as a title holder (CK3), -play=e_hre: skip the menu and start as the 1066 holder of a title
• Paradox: Launch with fixed RNG seed, -random_seed=42: reproducible runs, and it needs -debug_mode alongside it
• Paradox: Launch game (custom options), an empty set to fill in

A configuration is just a name and an args array:

{
  "type": "paradox-game",
  "request": "launch",
  "name": "Play as the HRE, seeded",
  "args": ["-debug_mode", "-develop", "-play=e_hre", "-random_seed=42"]
}

The args field documents the common options as you type: -debug_mode, -develop, -mapeditor, -continuelastsave, -skip (CK3), -play=<title> (CK3), -random_seed=<n>, -benchmark, -nographics for a headless observer game. An empty array launches vanilla.

Named configurations show up in the Run and Debug dropdown next to the presets, so "Play as the HRE, seeded" becomes one F5 away for the rest of the project.

When the Run button is missing

• The workspace is not a Paradox workspace. The toolkit lights up when it finds a mod descriptor or a game install in what you opened. Without one it stays out of the way, and the launch commands are hidden from the palette too. Open your mod folder, not its parent.
• The active file is not script or .gui. The Run button is per file type. On a localization .yml or a descriptor.mod there is no Run button, but F5 and the palette commands still work.
• The Map Editor entry is game-specific. See the table above.

Once the game is running, see Editor Features for the error.log watcher and what it turns the game's complaints into.