REQUIRES the Straw Harvest add-on: this mod works on its Premos 5000 and Bale Shredder, and on nothing else. Without that add-on installed it does nothing at all.
This is not a general purpose bale loader: it is built for one machine. It keeps the Premos 5000 and its Bale Shredder fed with square bales, so the pellet line keeps running while you are somewhere else on the farm.
The mod stays completely inert on every other vehicle in the game. It only wakes up on the Premos 5000 and the Bale Shredder; on anything else it does nothing at all: no key binding, no panel, no code running.
Park the machine, drop your bales next to it, switch the loader on with LEFT CTRL + N, and it feeds them onto the intake conveyor one at a time. Round bales are ignored, and so are contract bales and bales of a product the machine cannot process: they stay where they are and the panel counts them. Straw and hay are never mixed: the pellet tank holds one product at a time, so hay bales are loaded automatically once the tank no longer holds straw pellets (and the other way round). The panel shows which bales are waiting and why. The drop height is worked out from the size of each bale, so any square bale fits, and the conveyor is located in the machine itself instead of being guessed from fixed offsets. A small status panel in the top left corner shows how many bales are in range, how many are queued on the belt and how many have gone in. The loader stays on when you save and reload the game, and if the machine was running it starts again by itself.
On screen markers show where to drop the bales and which places on the belt are free or taken: they are on by default and F6 shows or hides them.
When the belt is full it waits instead of piling bales on top of each other, and when the tank is full it pauses the machine and starts it again once there is room.
PLEASE READ: this mod changes a machine from the Straw Harvest add-on: it raises the pellet tank of the Premos 5000 from 9,000 to 40,000 litres. Without it the tank fills up long before the bales around the machine are used up, and unattended operation is pointless. The change is applied to the machine at runtime, it does not edit any game file, and removing the mod puts the tank straight back to its original 9,000 litres. The size can be changed in settings.xml (tank capacity), and 0 keeps the original 9,000 litres. If you lower it while the tank holds more than the new size, the extra pellets are lost when the game loads.
Single player only. No new vehicles, no models, no textures: it is a script.
Settings live in modSettings/FS25_AutoBaleLoader/settings.xml. The file is created with the default values the first time the machine is loaded. Tank size, pick-up zone, drop position, queue length and movement speed can all be adjusted there without opening the zip.
V1.1.0.0
Bales of products the machine cannot process are no longer placed on the belt, where they blocked the queue
Straw and hay are no longer mixed: a bale is placed on the belt only if the pellet tank can accept its pellets; otherwise, it remains on the ground and the panel indicates this
Contract bales are left untouched
The loaders on/off state is saved with the game, and a running machine restarts automatically after loading
Pellet tank capacity can be adjusted in settings.xml (0 = original 9,000 litres)
settings.xml is created automatically with all values
