Population Density
Automatically places new players where they can find wood, animals, ore, and space to build. Also priority-based login queue, reserved slots for admins, idle boot ONLY when nearly full, entity thinning for lag reduction, and optional limited teleportation. Never again will your players experience a marathon run, spawn room full of portals, or maze of abandoned builds. This is a zero maintenance solution for administrators, and players don't need to learn any commands!
"This is THE plugin for large servers." – Mumblerit of muttsworldmine.com
Looking for a 1.12.2 or earlier-compatible version? Check here.
Got a question, suggestion, or problem? Post it on the issue tracker.
This video explains the region post system to new players.
See below for information on administrative features.
Feature Summary
- Assigns starting points for new players so that they can ALWAYS find space to build and beginner resources nearby. Players may be spawned directly there, or you can tell them about a slash command which will take them there.
- Respawns animals, regrows grass, and replants trees in the new player area to guarantee important new player resources.
- Removes idle players ONLY when the server is nearly full.
- Login queue to ensure fairness when your server is full, can prioritize some players over others if you like.
- Reserved slots for administrators.
- Optional teleportation posts which help players socialize and trade, but aren't abuse-able to escape combat or save a lost or hungry player.
- "Thins" extremely-dense crowds of monsters and animals, preventing ridiculous levels of farming or monster grinding from lagging your server.
Overview
Server owners often underestimate the badness in starting a player in a crowded area. Sure seeing builds makes your server look legitimate, but having to explore a long time just to find space to build and beginner resources is a major turn off for players who want to start playing right away. Even when players do find a place to start playing, they're often alone because other new players wandered into different areas.
PopulationDensity is the low-maintenance, easy-for-players answer to all these problems.
It works by automatically locating a region with lots of wood and ore, and then dropping new players in that region until they collect most of the easily accessible ore, cut down most of the trees, or crowd it with builds. Then PopulationDensity finds a new resource-wealthy region for future newbies and starts dropping new players there. If you have a great spawn area built up, you can instead spawn players there, and later tell them to use /HomeRegion when they're ready to start adventuring (or another command you define in commands.yml).
Additionally, optional teleportation commands help players move around quickly to admire builds and socialize while not compromising the game's integrity - players can only teleport from automatically-placed teleportation posts, so teleportation can't be used as an "easy-out" for players who mine or adventure themselves into trouble. That way, players keep the challenge of single player without the "players are too far apart" multiplayer issue.
Finally, if you have a "my server is always full" problem, then congratulations on your successful server! :) With PopulationDensity, you may optionally boot players who are idling so more players can log in and have fun, increasing your feel-good factor (or fattening your wallet, for some). when the server IS full, a login queue guarantees fairness, and administrative slots are set aside to guarantee administrators can always get in.
You can also assign players a queue priority to help them get on the server faster during peak times, to reward them for contributing to the server monetarily or through your community.
Requirements
- v6.0 and higher require Java 21
Setup, Configuration, and Commands documentation
Metrics: Like most other plugins this plugin collects anonymous metrics to see who's actually using this plugin, and this information is used to determine popularity as well as what features matter or not in the grand scheme of things.
Sponsors:

Got a question, suggestion, or problem? Post it on the issue tracker.

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Posted Mar 22, 2012@asdfasdfadf
Wilderness regions don't have names on purpose. That way nobody can teleport there except for the people who choose to live out in the wilderness away from others, and the friends they invite to them. It's a play style us admins have to respect, I guess.
There's no practical way to reliably tell whether or not players have touched an area, because even random world generation often places blocks like cobblestone, fence, chests, and wood plank. The only approach would be to log all player activities, which would be an enormous undertaking and performance hit for a small feature.
However if you just want to spread players farther apart, there's a config variable for that. But be careful that you don't set it so low that PD never finds a suitable region. :)
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Posted Mar 20, 2012I want to make it that players can use /addregion with a long cooldown like a day or 7 days.
How can I make it that new regions can only be made in areas where it was untouched by other players where nothing was mined and there was nothing built?
Also some players don't have a region name for their region since they live so far away, how do you generate a region name for a region?
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Posted Mar 13, 2012@bigscary
funny story, the download link on the top right still leads to the old version, i installed it, didnt realize it was the wrong one, on server restart it polled empty regions due to that old bug for 1.5 hours 8^) needless to say i was force to move the region folder while maintaining the player folder. The new threaded scanning quickly went through all the old regions, slight renaming happened but thats not really an issues.. Players complained a little about spam, but it was fine.
my point is threading works well.
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Posted Mar 13, 2012@mumblerit
Thank you for your patience, sir. :) Sorry about the mess left behind by the last couple of bugs (sunken posts and named posts in wilderness regions).
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Posted Mar 12, 2012@bigscary
my hero
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Posted Mar 12, 20122.6.1 Fixes!
To fix the regions where the post has been sunk, regenerate the chunk there and then use /addregionpost. If you don't want to regenerate the chunk, then place a block above the region post where you want the BASE of the region post to be, then /addregionpost.
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Posted Mar 11, 2012@bigscary
Server Full! VIP Bypass something along those lines
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Posted Mar 11, 2012Thanks, I'll get it fixed. Also can you give an example of what message you'd like to customize to? That way I can make sure it's "customizable enough".
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Posted Mar 11, 2012@mumblerit
ok possible odd bug,
players are spamming move in, every time they use it the region post sinks one space into the ground, lags server slightly. obviously its just a troll that thinks its funny.. i thought there was a timelimit on moveins?
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Posted Mar 11, 2012@mumblerit
one request: tweaking queue message
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Posted Mar 11, 2012@bigscary
sorry havent left any updates, was busy recently
2.6 works perfectly as far as I can tell, haven't upgraded build height on my server yet so cant speak about that, mutli threading seems to work perfectly, good job.
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Posted Mar 10, 20122.6 Updates!
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Posted Mar 8, 20122.5.1 Update! Fixed that tremendously elusive scanning bug!
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Posted Mar 7, 2012@mumblerit
I'm planning to dig into this a lot this afternoon. I might retract my bug if it turns out that rather than introducing a new bug, the bukkit guys actually fixed a bug that I didn't realize I was depending on. We'll see.
Edit: I got sidetracked with a super high severity bug over in GP last night. I did confirm that I can reproduce the bug now, though, so that's good. Also, the bug ONLY happens with upgraded worlds from 1.1. New worlds created under 1.2 don't have this problem. I'll keep working on it today.
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Posted Mar 7, 2012@bigscary
and a bug report on the glorious bukkit tracker! movin on up
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Posted Mar 7, 2012Well, on the up side, at least I have a reproducible bug now.
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Posted Mar 7, 2012@bigscary
thats the life of minecraft 8^)
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Posted Mar 7, 2012I can see this on my own server now, too. So I'll use my world for testing. I also logged a new bug under bukkit.
I now regret my decision to update to the beta instead of waiting for an RB. :(
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Posted Mar 6, 2012@bigscary
i keep looking at size of world too, but i dont know, id be willing to provide a copy of the world, but its big. after the world conversion 14gigs, i could pull out player files and such but i doubt wed save much room
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Posted Mar 6, 2012@mumblerit
I only have wild guesses about the problem. I'm running it on my own server which has a world upgraded from the old format without any issue so far. That kills most of my theories, because I can't imagine why your server would be different from mine, except for the size of your world and your amount of RAM, neither of which I think should matter.