Having gotten my copy of democracy 3 through GOG, I was a bit annoyed that the developer decided to make mods not work without steam. I remembered seeing the Cyberpunk mod a while back (a few years, actually) before I got the game, which is kind of the reason I got the game. With democracy 4 already released, I figured now was as good as time as any to try my hand at hex editing.
Upload your mod .pak file here, and download every thing and place them in the correct folders (sorry). Place that entire subdirectory to your democracy 3 installation, and THEN, move the config file to %YOUR_GAME_INSTALLATION%/data/mods. You may need to rename the folder that contains said mod to match the config file.
For how a correct mod should look, look at any one of your dlcs or example .zip mods from the positech site.
For nerds, it's a unsigned little-endian 32-bit integer indicating the file size, and then followed by the file. There's also a list of file names/structure and another integer denoting the size of said list at the top.
.pak files aren't a standard, even across franchies. Quake 1,2 vs Quake 4 use .pak files, but one built for Quake 1 can't open Quake 4's files because they aren't actually the same, on a nitty-gritty level. Most .pak files are really just disguised .zip files, but if you've gotten here, that likely didn't work. So how did I do this? HxD and a morning to kill staring at hexidecimal.