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.
Comments
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RoboMWM Owner
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_ForgeUser6348675 Contributor
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_ForgeUser7461846 Contributor
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_ForgeUser7828330 Former Author
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Forge_User_62037315 Author
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OffLuffy Contributor
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Spoon_r Tester
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Timelordm1 Contributor
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Posted Nov 12, 2012I have a problem: On my server, I have an area that I want to reserve for the world spawn... but I would like though for players to use commands such as /HomeRegion and /VisitRegion near the spawn in this area. But there is a problem...two regions overlap this area and make it so players can't use /HomeRegion in this spawn, because they are not close enough to a post. I noticed on your survival server that you have a spawn in the "wilderness", and yet players can use /HomeRegion and other commands in the spawn point. Does the wilderness allow you to use /HomeRegion and other commands since there is no region post? And if that is true, how do I make an area to be classified "wilderness". Thanks!
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Posted Nov 12, 2012@bigscary
If I give them the admin login permissions, then this could result in admins not being able to login; which is not a great idea. I see your point in not upping the maximum limit, but I would be happier dropping the max down from 20 to a virtual 16 (with 2 admin logins, and 2 donator logins). This might mean less total players allowed online, but would hopefully mean donators may always get online.
A query on the use of that command: If I give a player the prioritylogin permission node, then enter /loginpriority <player> 1, would this override the priority set by the permission node? Or would it default to the higher priority? When players vote, I give them a membership title via a set of commands. I thought a higher priority over new/guest players would be a good move, but don't want to end up overriding donator's priority.
EDIT: I think you may have misunderstood my request. Would it be possible to set aside a number of slots for admins, and a separate number of slots for priority logins and elite logins? It's important to ensure an admin or two can always log in; but would be nice to also ensure donators are able to log in at peak times without taking slots away from admins.
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Posted Nov 12, 2012@jwmpine
Yep, gotta have an open ceiling for the teleportation post. It ensures there will never be an issue teleporting the player into the right spot when arriving at the post. The only exception is the city post (/cityregion) which uses the world spawn.
@Infuscu
It doesn't make sense to have /homeregion available from the console, because at the console there's no in-game player, so who would teleport? There are several plugins which will allow you to do this kind of thing, for example command signs (I know you'd rather do it without a plugin, but a plugin will get it done for you).
@Netrarc
Yep just use /addregion to make it move on and find another space.
@Zefram
Well the point of authme is that players can't do anything until they've passed a test or given a password, etc. That, and stealing players' passwords of course. That idea is simply incompatible with PD, which needs to put players in the right place when they join. Do you really need authme? Why not just run in online mode? When you allow players to pretend to be anyone they want to be, it makes it impossible for you to stop griefers.
@zedadiaswick
Yes you can add more reserved slots. Just give those players the permission to use them. This could result in, for some cases, you getting more playres than your server can handle. For example suppose your server can handle 20 players at once, and you up the max players to 25 to account for 5 reserved slots. Now it's possible that when the reserved slots are filled, you could have 25 players online, lagging your server. To avoid this problem, I recommend instead just giving your donators a login priority bigger than 0. For example /loginpriority <player> 1. This won't guarantee them a login, but will always put them ahead of non-donators in the queue.
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Posted Nov 11, 2012As my server is now filling up fairly regularly, I've encountered the login queuing. It's great to have the admin-only slots reserved, but my dontors are still left waiting. Would it be possible to have an additional number of slots reserved for elite logins, and priority logins? Would be great to try and reduce the chance that donators would be left waiting to log in.
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Posted Nov 11, 2012i use AuthMe Reloaded
Population Density new players can't auto teleport to region
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Posted Nov 11, 2012On a new server I am building, I have reserved and restricted builds in a 500x500 space around the spawn area for future admin/community builds. However, the Population Density scan finds that the area is still resource-rich and places the first region within the reserved area. The result is that new players will be dropped into an unbuildable location.
Is there a way to tell the region spiral to start outside my reserved space?
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Posted Nov 11, 2012Suggestion:
I thought it would be kinda cool to hook up commands to the commandblock but that requires the commands to be available from the console. I'd especially like to be able to execute the homeregion command via a button/pressure plate at spawn .. to be able to do that, the command '/homeregion <name>' would be required to function ..
Reason: It would make it even simpler for new players to be able click a button or walk over some pressure plates to get started. This would obviously be an alternative to the just typing the command.
NB. I have allowed teleportation everywhere.
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Posted Nov 10, 2012New question bigscary lol
1st thanks for answering my last one..It was a disappointment to hear :( but we live with what we cannot control lol.
Anyways my actual question is. I'm building a spawn zone so that when players enter the world first time (the world that has population density) they spawn in the region of their first time. But my problem is I added a roof and when I went back o the region. It placed the region beacon or w/e on top of the roof. Do I need to have a open ceiling for the beacon or is there a config I can change to allow the beacon to be in closed buildings.
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Posted Nov 9, 2012@2shy4u
cityworldname in your config file should be the name of the WORLD where your city is located. The spawn for that world should be set in the actual city (you'll need another plugin to move a world's spawn point).
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Posted Nov 8, 2012Great plugin ! But I seem to have missed something. I am having problems with CityRegion. I have added the name of the city in the Config: CityWorldName: Daigon and I even renamed a region but I still get a message "There's no city to send you to."
I don't see any documentation on defining the city.
Any advise is greatly appreciated.
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Posted Nov 6, 2012@jwmpine
This plugin assumes that you have one primary world where all players play. If you're running a server where you have a collection of worlds for pvp, another collection for non pvp, another collection for creative mode, another collection for tekkit, etc etc, you will have some issues.
However, you can go to the config file and disable the "respawn in home region" to allow other respawn plugins to take over, or to allow vanilla minecraft to figure out the respawning for you.
@xclucky
It's normal to not have a sign when the region doesn't have a name yet. Those are what I call "wilderness" regions. The posts help players teleport AWAY from those regions, but it's not possible to teleport TO such a region unless you've first made it your home with /movein. This allows players who prefer some space to themselves to have some (not 100% guaranteed) level of privacy and solitude.
If you want to allow a player to build/break around the region posts, then you have to set that permission to TRUE. :)
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Posted Nov 5, 2012@bigscary
Thanks for satisfying my curiousity :) By the way, it says Redstone count is 0 and Diamond count is 0, is this also because of the depth or is this a bug?
Also, I've been noticing that the spawn thingys (the poles of glowstone with stone brick base) have been randomly generating all over my map without a sign on top... My memory is horrible so it may have been from a time that I wanted to test the plugin once before but removed it... Is there currently a bug such as this, or is my memory failing me again? I've found 2 such instances, neither of which are listed in /populationdensitydata/regiondata/. When I do break a block on one of these such region posts with node populationdensity.buildbreakanywhere being false, it does say "You can't break blocks this close to the region post." Any thoughts?
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Posted Nov 5, 2012This may have been asked before but how do I go about setting up the re-spawn so that if you die in another world you don't re-spawn where your home region is. I'D like it if that was true for the world your home is in but I don't want it reaching out of that specific world. Is that possible?
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Posted Nov 5, 2012@xclucky
Yes, those are counted as player blocks, but I find that they're not in large enough quantity to make a difference. Also the scan doesn't run all the way to bedrock - it stays relatively shallow because that's where new players will be looking for resources. :)
It scans on each restart, then every six hours during uptime (so yep, it restarts each time). The reason for scanning on every boot is to catch the (rare) case where the world has changed a lot since the last boot, for example if you had disabled PD for a while, or have regenerated your world.
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Posted Nov 3, 2012Does this plugin include fences, wood, stone brick, cracked stone brick, mossy stone brick, iron fences and such as player blocks? The reason I ask is becuase this could lead to an inaccurate reading being these blocks are commonly found in Mineshafts and Strongholds. If you have not already, perhaps depth should also be calculated in as a factor.
For exampe:
wood (plank) placed above y64 (water) is a player placed block
wood (plank) placed below y64 (water) is a world generated block
Also, does this plugin do scans on startup/shutdown? Does it carry Hoursbetweenscans through server restarts, or does that timer reset upon server restart?
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Posted Oct 29, 2012@KingCold999
Add "populationdensity" before all permission nodes.
None of the player commands have permission nodes associated, unless you've configured as such in the config.yml. In that case, see admin details page for which nodes apply to /newestregion and the other teleportation commands.
@CreeperZacny
Huh?
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Posted Oct 28, 2012skkf na screenie :3
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Posted Oct 28, 2012So... what are the NON operator/admin permission nodes? Like the node for the individual commands? (They are not referenced in administrative.)
Also, is there "populationdensity." before the node or are the nodes in administrative just what is written (buildbreakanywhere for example)?
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Posted Oct 23, 2012@oNcLe
I don't think I can fix the "I have a totally unique world layout that I want population density to understand" problem. For the animals, they are spawned along with monsters. So if you have monsters spawning above sea level at night, then you should see animals respawning in those same areas (assuming you're in the /newestregion).
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Posted Oct 23, 2012Hello,
really great plugin, i only miss the customizability. For Example my Server has many islands and there are like 500 blocks from each center... Same goes for the Animals the islands are extreme high (up to 250), so there are like 1-2 animals per island...
Would it be hard to add some more config options?, atleast for animals :D
greetings Thorsten