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 Jan 14, 2013@TheSpaceBetween
I'm sorry, I don't understand the question. :\ My guess is that you want PopDensity to go farther away from 0x0? Using /addregion will force it to move on from its current place, but it won't stop it from placing region posts every 400 blocks.
@baffle
See below. I'm sorry, but they can't be moved horizontally or deleted. You won't have this problem once you get past the initial "already built there" regions. You might consider using WorldEdit to move player builds so that they're not surrounding a region post?
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Jan 13, 2013Great plugin, I have a small problem though. The first home region it created was near someone's house, and it put the outpost like 5 blocks away from their garden. I tried removing the outpost but it spawns again if someone uses /homeregion. I know in config you can set it to not spawn them but I'd rather have them there, just not so close to someone's stuff. Is there any way to delete a region or move the outpost?
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Jan 13, 2013I just translated the last version of this plugin (3.6.6) completely in italian, please consider to place this on your database for helping my co-nationals managing this wonderful plugin in their language! Here's the plugin translated DOWNLOAD
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Jan 11, 2013perfect, thanks. I was wondering if there was some trick to getting it farther away, so what happens if someone spawns in that home region like 100 blocks?
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Jan 11, 2013@Feaelin
Ha, yes you correctly diagnosed your mix of animals problem. I'm assuming that MOST folks light their pastures so that they don't have to fight monsters in there.
As for the bug, I don't know if it's fixable on my end. I would expect the block "underneath" the animal to be reported as sandstone slab, not dirt. :\
@TheSpaceBetween
@shopro
Nope sorry, that's the warning I give in the setup/config instructions - posts land where they want to and refuse to go away. You can elevate them higher by building a platform above them, then typing /addregionpost. Now the one underneath can be removed and won't come back.
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Jan 11, 2013Great plugin but I was wondering if there is a way to prevent it from creating a new region on top of already build areas? Currently it keeps placing two new regions right in our main base, one on top of a building and another on a small empty flat ground between buildings. One other problem seems to be that new regions are made in the middle of the ocean.
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Jan 10, 2013Can you remove a region post? One spwaned right in the middle of my market :P.
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Jan 9, 2013Is it possible that the animal spawn code is checking the wrong block for grass?
Animals are spawning in a space that I'd not expect them to. The "room" is open to the sky and has a floor made of sandstone slabs in the "top" position. The block underneath the sandstone slab is a dirt block, which may or may not be a grassblock. [So top down: slab of sandstone, half-block of air, and then a dirt/grass block.]
When I looked at the code, it made sense, if I understood it correctly: check the block to spawn on, spawn only if it is grass...except the block they should be spawning on is a sandstone slab.
I'm supposing that a builder can work around this by making sure the layer under the slab is something other than dirt (untested theory) or by lighting the area properly (in my case it will be eventually, I've not decided on the construction of the ceiling and lighting yet...).
But, I'm wondering if this is a fixable bug...
Looking at the code answered my other question: "Why do I keep having [some other animal] in my cattle range?" Answer: "Not lit well enough." :)
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Jan 8, 20133.6.6 Fix
1. Update your config.yml to reduce the minimum post Y by one (to 62).
2. /reload.
3. For each post which seems wrong, break the stone brick block immediately underneath the post, then /addregionpost.
@mumblerit
Please post your error information? Thanks. :)
@shaitand2
This is a mojang/bukkit bug related to teleporting players who have just now logged into the server for the first time. Fortunately, it ONLY impacts players who are brand new to the server, so there's no danger of them losing anything from their inventories. Sorry for the trouble, it's a very persistent but I've been unable to fix or work around on my end.
@matedgo
Sorry no, posts are impossible to get rid of entirely unless you completely disable post building in your config file. For individual problematic posts, you could raise it up higher by building a platform above it, then doing /addregionpost. Now you can remove the lower post and it won't come back.
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Jan 8, 2013is there any possiblity to remove region post, because it spawned not on really nice place ;(.
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Jan 8, 2013tested on your survival server. Looks great!
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Jan 6, 2013@bigscary
Thanks for the update <3
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Jan 6, 2013I have an odd problem where when a new player first logs on they are spawned in lava underground. After they die they respawn at the appropriate home region post. Since I start new players with an initial kit and they can't regenerate this kit it means they lose everything.
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Jan 6, 2013With 3.6.5, I am seeing RegionPosts which were on y=63 moving up a block. With some testing, it appears that even without any blocks above y=60 they will not be placed on anything below y=64. This lead me to believe that the MinimumRegionPostY setting in the config may be ignored, or slightly off (it is set to 63 in my config.yml). I don't have a test server to test this on, so cannot test changing the setting to 62 to see if it makes a difference.
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Jan 5, 2013@mumblerit
cant narrow down issue, will continue to monitor, could be unrelated.
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Jan 5, 2013didnt work at first , guessing once it ran a region scan it fixed. sorry. all is well now
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Jan 5, 2013I looked at the download URL and found the new patch with a bit of trying :-)
Population Density 3.6.5
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Jan 5, 2013@bigscary
I don't think we can see 'approving' files under the files tab.
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Jan 5, 2013@bigscary
Only the author can see the files pending approval... but you can always hotlink the address to it on your front page. ;)
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Jan 4, 2013@bigscary
Edit: seems like an issue with max open files? Ive raised it a few times but, seems unnecessary, we have a few hundred regions but previous versions had no issues