Why do I have to change my Settings path?

Why am I seeing this pop-up?

Path of Building does not handle Unicode strings (most characters that appear outside of this table). This means that if any save location contains those characters, PoB will fail to load or save files to it, including your Settings.xml.

Why is this happening now? It worked fine before!

Unfortunately when PoB switched from a 32-bit application to a 64-bit one it lost some of the functionality Windows provided "for free" in translating a Unicode path correctly on the back end. We're working on a fix for Unicode in general, but this workaround was a faster fix to stop PoB from hard crashing for people on startup.

Is there a way I don't have to specify a path every time?

Yes! By default, PoB will check your Documents folder. If that location contains those pesky Unicode characters, it'll fail. You can right-click the Documents folder and edit that location. See this issue comment for a succinct explanation and accompanying picture: https://github.com/PathOfBuildingCommunity/PathOfBuilding/issues/7431#issuecomment-2017643145