Custom Category Template

I’ve been scouring the internet (google and wordpress) for about five days now and have not had luck with my situation, here goes…

The two major sections of my website are based on categories. Section one is my Work so that is a category with five sub categories and the other is Hobby with another five sub categories. The sidebar on each page is a menu of their respective categories. So if you are on the Work page and you click Print in the sidebar menu I want the content to just show anything that is tagged as “Print”.

Okay so I have the code all written and tested in category.php, everything does what I want no problem. I’ve read the Category Templates documentation, I get the hierarchy, tested the hierarchy by removing the files. Again everything works except when I try to create a category-slug.php or category-ID.php. I’ve tried changing the permalinks, still nothing.

Am I missing something? Do I need to register the category templates in the functions or something? Those two files are just being completely ignored.

I am using pre_get_post to have my CPT recognized which is functioning as needed.

Any insight would be helpful, this is my last hurdle before publishing my website externally.