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.

-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Nov 24, 2012Getting the exact same problem as the person below me. Whenever I issue a command i get an internal server error. Running lastest version on 1.4.5 Bukkit.
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Nov 23, 2012I'm was wondering what is the parent permission node? For example under the permissions section you say use * or buildbreakanywhere but don't list the parent node. Is it populationdensity.* or populationdensity.buildbreakanywhere?
Secondly, I'm running your plugin (v3.1) on my Tekkit server and I'm getting nothing but NullPointerExceptions no matter what command I use. Please Help.
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Nov 23, 2012@bigscary
This graph is 15 min after boot :) I know that its scans the regions at boot, but im just wondering what configuration settings should i use to minimize ress usage :) Mostly thinking CPU wise.
Is monster thinning/animal, cpu friendly? :D
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Nov 22, 20123.6.3 Update!
@GameplayerHD
Very glad you like it. :) To put this in context, what is your TPS when you see graphs like this? And is it always like this every time you look, or only rarely, like right after boot or every few hours?
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Nov 22, 2012Love you plugin using it on a new big server :D
Its causing some lag when server gets 100+ online, is there any configuration you recommend to minimize the lag? Dont think its because of ram, we have 12 GB allocated and 9 gb free memory at that time with 40 players at that time. Think its CPU wise? :) We have a strong cpu.
Heres a little view of how much performance it uses, compared to everything else:
http://gyazo.com/ba60dfb4487c7f207626825163c949d8.png?1353632790
Thanks, great work :D
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Nov 19, 2012@WayGroovy
Future version.
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Nov 19, 2012@bigscary
Thanks. I look forward to the config. Was it added in 2.6.2, or will it be in a future addition?
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Nov 16, 2012@VietNg
Spigot crafbukkit should look into being compatible with a wider range of bukkit plugins. I'm not doing anything very weird, just placing some grass when an animal spawns.
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Nov 16, 2012Would you consider looking at making this Compatible with Spigot craftbukkit since most big servers use that version?
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Nov 15, 2012@Zefram
No again (third time).
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Nov 15, 2012hi bigscary
AuthMe plugin break Population Density
auto teleport to region post Function
please you add config
auto teleport delay sec option
i can't enable online mode
i Implore you
Population Density is Great plugins
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Nov 14, 20123.6.2 Update!
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Nov 14, 2012@bigscary
Ah, I see now...Thanks a lot!
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Nov 14, 2012@rock_retep
Oh, let me explain how I configured that post.
1. I set my "city world" to be the same as my managed world.
2. I manually built that post in creative mode.
3. I used another plugin to set the world's spawn point on top of that post.
4. I set the "max distance from spawn to use home region" to approximately the radius of my city.
Setup is detailed in the administrative details page - if the explanation is unclear there, please tell me and I will try to clarify it.
@zedadiaswick
Yep, let me look into it. Should be easy for me to accomplish.
@WayGroovy
Such large farms tend to lag servers, so there's "thinning" code which reduces the total animals and total monsters in a chunk. I'll add a config option for you, but try to keep it in mind for later - eventually, you'll have a lag problem due to players being ridiculous with their farms if your server continues to be popular.
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Nov 13, 2012@bigscary
I tried to set loginpriority via the console, and I got the following back:
/LoginPriority <player name> <priority, 0 - 100>
Which tells me it hasn't set their priority. Could we have this command available via the console, please? I need this functionality to be able to set it for players who have voted.
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Nov 13, 2012Since adding this plugin, I've noticed a change in the behavior of some of the farms on my server. Various villager-irongolem farming, chicken farming, now seems very inefficient. It appears that entities that typically do not despawn, even pet wolves.
Is this configurable or disablable in any way? I really want to use the zoning of pop-den but I do not really want to change the spawning mechanics of the game.
I considered removing population-density alltogether, but then I noticed that the pillars were scattered around my map, and players were asking why these existed and why the command didn't work.
Thanks for the plugin,
-WG
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Nov 13, 2012@bigscary
Ah, alright. Thanks for considering my request anyway.
With regards to the login priority, that's great! Exactly how I want to use it.
Thanks, Bigscary.
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Nov 13, 2012@bigscary
My apologies, I didn't explain very well at all. I noticed on your survival server that you have the spawn set in the "wilderness", and that you can use commands such as /HomeRegion anywhere in that spawn area.
I would like the same for my server, but there are two named regions that are in my desired spawn area, thus making the /HomeRegion command not possible, with a post far away from my spawn that I want.
How did you define the spawn on your survival server to be "wilderness"? And...does the "teleport anywhere" config option allow you do so anywhere in the "wilderness"...or anywhere on the map?
Thanks again!
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Nov 13, 2012@zedadiaswick
The player will get the higher of the two - if permissions nodes provide a higher priority,then they will take effect. Otherwise, the slash command priority will determine it.
I do understand your request better now, but I don't want to service it. :\ Adding more levels of logins will complicate matters on my end, and I doubt many will use it (you're the first to ever ask for it).
@rock_retep
Sorry, but I'm confused about your description of the "overlapping regions" problem. Can you please try explaining again? Regions are arranged in a grid, so there can't be an actual overlap. Maybe you meant some other kind of overlap?
There are always posts, every 400 blocks, everywhere the player goes. Even in the wilderness. The same rules apply to all posts - you can't teleport unless you're next to a post, unless the server admin (you?) has set the "teleport anywhere" config option in the config file.
@Zefram
Only new players who've never been on the server before will be auto-teleported to their home region on login. Since you've already logged into the server, you just log in at the spot where you logged out. Do you have access to another account? If not, you can simulate a first time login by BOTH deleting your pop density player data file AND deleting your player data file under your spawn world's folder.
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Nov 12, 2012hi bigscary
i set NewPlayersSpawnInHomeRegion: true
BuildRegionPosts: true
and remove authme plugin
can't auto teleport to region post
please see this movie