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

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Posted Jul 31, 2012@Peregrin5
I use this on a 20 slot server, and it's great. The players really like that they can teleport because the world is always growing, and I like that they can't teleport out of danger.
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Posted Jul 31, 2012@saintcrime
Yes, the post could land on top of or next to somebody's house. This is the challenge anyone has in enabling this plugin for a world which already has lots of builds. You will have to deal with this on a case by case basis, either by giving the player permission to edit around the post, or compensating the player for the damage somehow and having him move his house a little to the left.
The only way to get a list of all regions is to view the list of files in your regiondata folder.
No, you can't change the list of region names so that new regions get custom names automatically. If you have suggestions for good "minecraft-style" region names, then tell me and I'll add them to the default list.
You can name a wilderness region with /nameregion. It won't rename existing regions (yet).
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Posted Jul 31, 2012Sounds awesome. If I ever increase my server size to these proportions, I'll use this. Thanks.
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Posted Jul 30, 2012Hi Bigscary, I have a couple of questions about the regions and their posts.
1.I understand that the regions are every 400x400 blocks. Does the post always get placed exactly at the center of a region. Also, if people have built something like a house in a wilderness region, and it gets opened and PD puts a region post in the region will the post be placed on someones build/house/etc or is it adjusted and moved to nearest unclaimed/built land?
2.Is there a way to get a list of regions. I see we can use /whichregion for the one we are in but is there a command like /regionlist to list the names of all opened regions? If not could this be added, and when you list regions could it color the name of the newest region in the list??
3.Is there a way to open a specific region, so it gets a post and name? Example would be I go out and build something as an admin in the wilderness, I then want to make it available to players with a post, can this be done?
4.Can we name the regions or alter the region naming list?
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Posted Jul 29, 2012The only problem you may have with Towny is if lots of players have already started towns, because the region posts (which can't be moved) land every 400 blocks. So it's possible the region posts may land in existing builds, forcing the owners of those builds (or towns?) to "build around" the post. This isn't a problem specific to Towny. It's just any server where you 're enabling PD when there are already builds.
What you describe is what I have on my server. I'm "just minecraft" plus this low power teleportation and wilderness area assignment. I think it works very well.
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Posted Jul 27, 2012Would this work well with a server that uses Towny?
Not compatibility wise, but say... more logically... would it function well with it?
Also, is there anything that would prevent people from leaving the region they are auto-assigned?
I want to encourage an open, vanilla-type experience on my server, while still providing this sort of thing as an option.
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Posted Jul 24, 2012What's your server specs? CPU, RAM? If your server is extremely underpowered, it's possible the region scan will lag you (preventing players from logging in) while it runs. If you wait for the initial region scan to finish, can players still not log in? It will help if you use pastebin to give me more logs, instead of just the excerpts you think are important. :)
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Posted Jul 24, 2012it is filled in,if i relaod,server crash,and at restart ist crash when some1 join
Config: PopulationDensity: NewPlayersSpawnInHomeRegion: false RespawnInHomeRegion: true CityWorldName: '' AllowTeleportation: true TeleportFromAnywhere: true MaxDistanceFromSpawnToUseHomeRegion: 25 ManagedWorldName: Farmworld DensityRatio: 1.0 MaxIdleMinutes: 60 LoginQueueEnabled: true MinimumPlayersOnlineForIdleBoot: 7 ReservedSlotsForAdministrators: 1 TicksPerAnimalSpawn: 100 LoginQueueMessage: '%queuePosition% of %queueLength% in queue. Reconnect within 3 minutes to keep your place. :)' HoursBetweenScans: 6 BuildRegionPosts: true NewestRegionRequiresPermission: false GrassRegrows: true
Log:(last be4 log) 2012-07-24 15:19:17 [INFO] /109.90.153.73:50355 lost connection 2012-07-24 15:19:17 [INFO] /79.211.168.150:2812 lost connection 2012-07-24 15:19:17 [INFO] /91.41.183.222:59626 lost connection 2012-07-24 15:19:17 [INFO] GroupManager - INFO - Bukkit Permissions Updated! 2012-07-24 15:19:17 [INFO] PopDensity: Examining available resources in region "0 0"...
STart of plugin: 2012-07-24 15:19:10 [INFO] [PopulationDensity] Enabling PopulationDensity v3.1 2012-07-24 15:19:10 [INFO] PopDensity: PopulationDensity enabled. 2012-07-24 15:19:10 [INFO] PopDensity: Open region: "redstone" at 0 0.
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Posted Jul 23, 2012@ywer
Look higher in your log file. Probably you haven't set the managed world config option. It is required for you to fill in.
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Posted Jul 22, 2012hi, i started the plugin and after 2012-07-22 13:14:51 [INFO] PopDensity: Examining available resources in region "0 0"... server crash no Error on Startup,plz help
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Posted Jul 16, 2012@Spyboticsguy
Nope, you have to choose a world.
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Posted Jul 15, 2012Is PopulationDensity capable of managing more than one world? If so, how would it be configured to allow this?
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Posted Jul 12, 2012Reduce the density ratio. Maybe try .5
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Posted Jul 11, 2012The Density thingy in the config is kinda confusing. I need so the people have a LOT of place to build (Creative server). How to do thats? >.<
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Posted Jul 8, 2012@SmoothNanners
Just set spawn in home region to false. New players will still get assigned a region, but they won't be placed their when they join the server. You could also disable respawn in home region, if you would rather they went back to the server's spawn when they die.
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Posted Jul 8, 2012@bigscary
Is it possible to disable regions, so that new players don't spawn in newly named regions, but still keep those named regions?
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Posted Jul 6, 2012@TheWabbitKiller
Wow, how big is your spawn? Anyway you can remove the region posts, but they'll still function. If you have a monstrous city spawn, the only way to get this to work very smoothly is to have your city in one world, and manage another world with PD. Then you link the two by telling PD in its config file which is your city world, and which is the world to manage. But that's not easy to implement after the fact - it's something best done while planning your server initially. :\
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Posted Jul 6, 2012Is it possible to remove regions? Some regions have been created in my spawn.
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Posted Jul 1, 2012@joshwenke
The command is /randomregion. It will take them only to named regions, so on a new server, it won't go anywhere initially because there are very few regions. If you want to seed it, you can use /addregion a few times to get some more regions to start with.
It's not possible to give players only that command. They will have access to all teleportation commands, or none. So they'll still have /movein and /homeregion, as well as /visitregion <name> no matter what you do. But since /randomregion can be used in place of any of these with a little patience, it shouldn't be a problem that they also have access to those other teleportation commands.
To allow them to teleport from anywhere, there's a config option for that. But they may abuse that one to escape combat or save them from being lost in the wilderness, so that's something to consider.
I submit that allowing PD to choose on its own where to put players is better than randomly placing them. Random placement won't guarantee resource availability or space to build, and will spread new players apart so they will be less likely to meet up and make friends.
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Posted Jul 1, 2012How would I format my config to just make it so they type a command and teleport to the wilderness, then the plugin does nothing else. It seems like this plugin has that functionality, but how would I go about doing that?
Like one command to teleport them randomly to a place in one specific world, each time the command is used you go to a different location.
Thanks!