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 Dec 8, 2012@bigscary
<<quote>>@xclucky:No sorry. Even disabling /randomregion wouldn't really do any good, because players could still use /visitregion to go to a specific region. And without /invitetoregion, players who wander into the wilderness will be forever alone (which I suppose you might be okay with). Anyway I'm not planning to make specific teleportation commands unavailable, but you could disable teleportation altogether in the config?<</quote>>
I use essentials and stargates for teleportation, I use population-density to prevent areas from becoming too cluttered. However, I do not want players to be able to just teleport to regions without use of a stargate. The only command I want to allow players to use is /homeregion, and that is mainly becuase that is the only way for players to escape from my tutorial.
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Posted Dec 8, 2012@bigscary
EDIT: Sorry Bigscary, this appears to have been totally coincidental. I have downgraded again to 3.6.1, and the mobs are not spawning this time. It seems so sporadic. So this likely has nothing to do with PD. Thanks for being so understanding.
At the time, I updated CB to 1.4.5 R0.2, but downgraded straight back to R0.1 when I noticed the lack of mob spawns. Otherwise, I made no other changes to my configuration. I am still running R0.1, and downgrading from PD 3.6.3 to 3.6.1 seems to resolve my issue. Was 3.6.2 the version where you added /loginpriority from console for me? That was the only change listed, were there any other changes which might have caused another plugin to begin acting up?
I can try downgrading all plugins back to before I updated them, and then try to update PD on its own, see what happens there. I am reluctant to downgrade GP in case a change may leave claims inaccessible or some such; Any reason I should be fearful or am I completely safe to do so?
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Posted Dec 8, 20123.6.4 Fix
@Bluffer17
Most of the time when players get ridiculous with the number of animals in their farm, it's claimed by GP anyway, so it wouldn't help. :\ I did make some adjustments anyway based on your feedback.
@Ferkswe
You can use /addregion to force PD to stop automatically placing new players in the current newest region, but there's no option to stop players from moving into any region. If the region is overcrowded and they still want to move in despite being sent somewhere perfectly good, then that's on them, right?
@xclucky
No sorry. Even disabling /randomregion wouldn't really do any good, because players could still use /visitregion to go to a specific region. And without /invitetoregion, players who wander into the wilderness will be forever alone (which I suppose you might be okay with). Anyway I'm not planning to make specific teleportation commands unavailable, but you could disable teleportation altogether in the config?
@Blockia
Sorry I wish I could help you with that - it looks like it may be a Java problem. Do you have the option to reinstall your java, maybe switch versions?
@zedadiaswick
PD isn't doing anything at all to stop entities from spawning (ever). It only removes overcrowded entities, and in the /newestregion, spawns animals. Did you also update your CB? Maybe to a dev build, which could have a bug, maybe? Since you're the only person to complain and the problem would seem to be massively obvious to anyone who experiences it, I think it's likely a problem with your configuration (CB? java? other plugins?).
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Posted Dec 8, 2012@BigScary
After I updated several plugins on my server (including GP, CommandBook, AntiXray, Pop Density and PVPtime) mob spawning seemed to grind to a halt, or almost. Very few monsters would spawn through my worlds, I think I caught some spawning and then immediately disappearing.
Prior to this update, I was running 3.6.1. Have updated to 3.6.2, then to 3.6.3. I managed to trace the issue back to PD by downgrading to 3.6.1 again, which immediately resolved the issue. Mobs were back in force. Upgrading to 3.6.3 once again caused all mobs to stop spawning (though did not seem to immediately remove the previously spawned mobs). Before downgrading I turned off mob thinning, in an attempt to rue out PD. with or without this enabled, mobs do not spawn. Do you have any idea why this might be?
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Posted Dec 8, 2012Is it possible to prevent posts from spawning in the ocean? Every post on my server seems to be in the ocean.
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Posted Dec 7, 2012Whenever Population Density begins a scan, my server crashes and I get a Java error:
A fatal error has been detected by the Java Runtime Environment:SIGSEGV (0xb) at pc=0x00007faae4c888ec, pid=16372, tid=140367389263616JRE version: 6.0_18-b18# Java VM: OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (14.0-b16 mixed mode linux-amd64 )# Derivative: IcedTea6 1.8.13# Distribution: Debian GNU/Linux 6.0.4 (squeeze), package 6b18-1.8.13-0+squeeze2# Problematic frame:# V [libjvm.so+0x5058ec]#Any help?
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Posted Dec 7, 2012Could you please add a way to disable some of the commands? I do not want players using the randomregion or invitetoregion commands. If you know of a plugin that can disable commands, this would be even more useful, however, I've been searching for weeks and keep coming up empty.
@Ferkswe there should be something in the config to prevent a region from being created in a worldguard region and also you can not close a region, as the plugin will just remake one in the same area.
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Posted Dec 7, 2012Hey, any way I can manually close a region? I have a region where most things are Worldguard protected and I don't want to encourage people to try and move in here. Thanks!
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Posted Dec 6, 2012Yeah, i was tired and did'n see the else state.
Maybe you are right and limit must stay at 8, but it's hard to tell some users why some animals are gone from their home. And there is some practical problems then you try to make litle farm: many players have home less then 1 chunk, but they still want to have farm with different animals in it. And they like to build tower-like houses.
Maybe some integration with GriefPrevention to expand this limits in private regions?
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Posted Dec 6, 2012@Bluffer17
That's an else-if block. A "monster" is only considered a monster if it's a creature which is NOT an animal. However there is a potential issue with villagers, so I'll update.
You don't think that more than 8 animals in a chunk is excessive? Give them room to breathe, man! :) I'll increase it a bit, but I don't want to add a config option that few will understand without some lengthy explanation.
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Posted Dec 5, 2012*not needed :)
One feature request: configuration settings to control how much animals/monsters leave in chunk.
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Posted Dec 3, 2012@ryvix
Yep, these are the risks you take when you run a dev build. Sorry guys, I don't have the free time to test and update all of my plugins for all the dev builds. Even if I did, it's often impossible for plugin developers to work around bugs in CraftBukkit.
Sorry Shadbusher, I removed your comment because it was huuuuuuge. :)
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Posted Dec 3, 2012@LeeTheENTP
This is very likely what I was talking about. Signs don't get placed properly around the posts. The directions just have to be updated in the code is all. Don't use a dev build of CB if you don't want this to happen.
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Posted Dec 1, 2012This plugin got messed up in the latest dev build I do believe.
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Posted Nov 30, 2012@Chaett
Yep, just do /reload.
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Posted Nov 30, 2012How do you reload the configs? Or do we have to always do a server restart or /reload all.
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Posted Nov 29, 2012@Dr_Proffesor
There's no permission node for invitations. Anyone can use /invitetoregion to invite someone to teleport to their home region (which they can set with /movein).
A region "closing" just means that new players will not be automatically assigned to live there when they join the server. The region is still there and players can visit it and build there, and so on. The open region is "closed" automatically when it gets too crowded with player builds, or when most of the easy-to-reach early game resources like wood and coal are gone.
@Hawkeyezd
Thank you for the compliment. :) I'm very glad you find my work helpful!
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Posted Nov 29, 2012Sir, you are a legend!
Must use plugin for survival servers, great anti-X-ray, grief protection etc. Thank you!
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Posted Nov 27, 2012What is perm for inviting, its not here it seems and can i control where that post thing starts out at, what do you mean region closes when used
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Posted Nov 26, 2012@GameplayerHD
Yes, animal/monster thinning is overall better for your CPU than not having it, since it eliminates giant piles of monsters and animals which would otherwise have to be considered every tick.
@chiorigreene
@skylonrow
The likely problem is that you need to set your "managed world" in the config file. Please check your logs during boot to see if you have an error message to that effect. :)