It sucks, frankly, that this is a problem at all, and ideally all mod authors would have their mods available somewhere that anyone can access. Lofi opening up the workshop api seems to me to be a much simpler solution all round.

I have considered the issue, and again, individually asking mod authors to put their files elsewhere requires me to have a steam account, which I'd rather not create just for that purpose, the mod authors need to respond to me, which I have experience from other games to suggest that very few are likely to do so, and it requires those mod authors that do respond to do extra work that they probably don't want to do in making it available somewhere else. Anecdotal evidence from other games is that steam doesn't mess with mod structure. Thanks for the response, and I'm sure you're right about how easy it is to relocate the mods. I liked the assumption about mere partial location on a russian server may be a potential sign of malware threat though 8)

I think your best bet would really be to contact mod devs and ask them to send you the files, people would hardly dick about it. I don't know about other games, but with Kenshi, relocating the mod anywhere is as easy as copy-pasting the folder.

Workshop mods without game