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 Oct 5, 2012@bigscary
Perhaps we could build the first one in game how we like (Could be a castle, tower, or similar post with different blocks etc, including npcs etc and then select two points to upload it in a YML file and have it replace the current ones & use the new one from now on?) I don't know if its possible, but just a thought. I realize it would be hard to do, but thanks for reading/considering it. :)
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Posted Oct 5, 2012@mumblerit
@Resettii
It would be cool and very hard for me to do. :) Imagine trying to express what you want your region posts to look like in a YML file.
@Infuscu
Check your logs and make sure that PD has actually settled on a region it likes. It may go through several regions it doesn't like before finally stopping on one. Also, PD considers trees/coal/iron to be "close enough" if they're within 200 blocks (there has to be a lot of them though).
If your logs say "looks good! will assign new players here" and you don't like the chosen area, then do /addregion to nudge PD forward to look for another spot.
The large biome map shouldn't make any difference.
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Posted Oct 5, 2012I am having a problem with regions being opened in deserts and treeless areas. I've literally only a few regions open but they're all in a major desert. I am using a large biome map. Does that make any difference?
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Posted Oct 4, 2012@Resettii
i agree. that would be cool.
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Posted Oct 4, 2012@bigscary
Alright, no problem. I'm already doing that, but was thinking it may be easier if it were just added onto this one so I don't need a separate plugin for it.
If you are ever inclined to do so, may I request being able to edit the region posts, choosing what is built there & which type of blocks, for example maybe some would like a tower or small house with an npc instead? I know we can likely manually edit them, but it would be nice to say I want all of my posts to be (insert here) and have it be automatic. Thanks for reading.
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Posted Oct 3, 2012@Resettii
No sorry, use another plugin to do it. There are several. :) You can remove the plugin after you set the spawn where you want.
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Posted Oct 2, 2012@bigscary
Hello, thank you for the great plugin!
I may have missed it if it already exists, but I was wondering if you could add a command to set a main spawn for every new person who joins the server? After they spawn there, they will never spawn there again. From that point on they will spawn in a homeregion if they die.
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Posted Oct 1, 2012@Torleik_
I suggest:
1. Set your "city world" config option to the name of the world where your new players initially spawn.
2. Set your "distance from spawn to use home region" to the distance between your spawn and the button they have to press (add 10 blocks just to be safe).
Now when they click the button, they're close enough to the spawn so their /homeregion command works.
@joinapolarn
I think if you wait just a little bit and check again, you'll find that PD is still searching for a region. But if you wait a while and it doesn't move on AND you don't like the area, then just do /addregion like mumblerit suggested. Personally, I sometimes /addregion for swamps because players don't like to start in a swamp. :)
Permissions are on the administrative details page.
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Posted Sep 29, 2012@joinapolarn
just /addregion to make a new region
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Posted Sep 29, 2012Are you able to delete a region?
My first region was spawned right in a big ocean... :(
And also, which permissions are they?
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Posted Sep 29, 2012@bigscary
Well, I guess my setup is the unique reason I needed teleport from anywhere still on. I have a spawn area for the build world which has a tutorial for grief prevention and some info about that world, then right in the middle I have a button, that they are told to press to start building. When they do, it forces them to run /homeregion to bring them into either the newest region, or back to where they have been before. This means that even if they never read anything, and just go hit that button every time, they will still be able to get to their house. but this depends on them being able to use that command where the button is, which is not near any posts.
I have all the other teleport capabilities, just was hoping I could tweak this into my setup without having to redesign.
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Posted Sep 29, 2012@VietNg
We are using population density with Spigot along with 42 other plugins which all work perfectly fine. If something is going wrong I would guess it has to do with your setup somewhere. Whether it be setup of spigot, your permission plugin, or some other plugin that is arguing with popdens, or even your popdens config, the issue is not with Spigot otherwise we couldn't run it...
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Posted Sep 28, 2012@bigscary
it works fine with cbplusplus and tekkit.
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Posted Sep 27, 2012I'd love to use it. But i'm afraid it's gonna crash the server again with Spigot craftbukkit
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Posted Sep 27, 2012@Torleik_
Maybe add a /sethome and /home plugin? That's the easiest teleportation system for eliminating the "help I'm lost" problem. :) You can still keep PD for region-specific teleportation and automatic new player assignment. Young players also like /tpa, which you can get from TeleportSuite and similar plugins.
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Posted Sep 26, 2012@bigscary
So, unfortunately, them needing to find a region post is part of my problem lol. The reason I need to be able to allow teleport from anywhere, but restricted to that world is because my players probably have the lowest age of any server and are then accordingly the derpiest. Meaning if they even can remember the command to teleport, they won't understand why they can't teleport even if they get a chat message that pops up telling them they have to be near a pole. I know your plugins were built with nooblets in mind, but your simple concepts still confuse my players lol. Incase you are wondering why, we have all the traffic from yogscast fans...
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Posted Sep 26, 20123.5 Updates!
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Posted Sep 26, 2012@bigscary
Understood. Thank you for your consideration :)
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Posted Sep 26, 2012@xclucky
Like Mumblerit mentioned, it can eventually happen, and you'll just need to expand your borders at that point. Because PD creates regions in a spiral pattern starting at your world spawn, you won't run into this problem until all or nearly all of your existing in-border areas are either overcrowded or out of resources.
Because this happens so infrequently and because hooking into other plugins is a high-difficulty, high-maintenance problem, I'm not planning to do that.
@k7iwon
In the next version, I'm going to try sending the chunk to the player before teleporting him there. I don't know if that will actually solve the problem - it's difficult to confirm because the problem is impossible to replicate dependably (so when it doesn't happen, I don't know if that's because I got lucky that time, or the fix I put in is actually improving the situation).
Putting players beside the post may be a bad idea. I put them on top of the post so that monsters can't reach them, and so that they don't teleport directly into a lava flow (in case someone puts some lava nearby, and it flows downhill around the post). Plus, I don't think it would solve the problem. They could still fall through the ground or repeatedly fall out of the air there, just as they did on top of the post.
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Posted Sep 26, 2012@xclucky
eventually it will, but it will take a very long time (months)