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 Feb 2, 2013Why is my queue not working? It's enabled but when the server is full the server just says: ''Server full'' when the server is at 76/78. I know populationdensity uses 1 reserve slot so i think populationdensity thinks it's not full yet. Do you know wich other plugin auto gives you a reserve slot? Maybe McMyAdmin?
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Posted Feb 1, 2013If I want people more spread (less dense) do I put 1.0 higher or lower?
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Posted Feb 1, 2013@krisdestruction
Dude, if it's that easy, just code it yourself. Decompiling isn't that hard.
As for the tutorial area...just read the docs for this plugin. You can set up a starting area, and force people to be next to a region post before they teleport. That nicely solves the permissions issues.
For what it's worth, nobody reads any tutorial that is more than 3 signs anyway, so I think you're wasting your time.
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Posted Feb 1, 2013@bigscary
I have 2 posts up when I use /randomregion. How will /addregion help me in this manner?
I have visitors/guests that read a tutorial and undergo a promotion process once they're done. I don't want them to use /homeregion until they finish teleporting them out of the tutorial. I'm sure most servers have a similar tutorial idea but this plugin breaks that workflow. Adding permission nodes for each command should be simple process though with the player.hasPermission() function; it's like 1 line of code.
I've already disabled most of the commands (only /homeregion is left) by remapping the commands using CommandHelper. I just think that it'd be easier for most admins to do this without working around the issue itself.
My map is 10k x 10k blocks which should be sufficiently enough. Either way, it should stop if it realizes there's no space, not force the players to go where they can't go. Can you at least make it stop running an algorithm if a new one is to be added outside the border?
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Posted Feb 1, 2013@SyncCraft
Double-check that permission for those players? Try a permissions dump for them to make sure they do have it. They should get one of those 5 reserved slots if they have the permission.
@krisdestruction
/addregion skips an area (moves on to the next area, but doesn't remove the post).
Putting a region post in an existing build is not avoidable. That's why I warn about it in the docs.
Won't add permissions nodes for each command. There's an option to limit /newestregion, but not for the rest.
That's because there's no suitable place to put new players inside your borders. You have to expand your borders.
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Posted Jan 31, 2013Can you also please make sure that region posts are put within a world border? Atm there are region posts that are outside my world border
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Posted Jan 31, 2013Can you also create permission nodes for each command? I want to disable some commands but am unable to.
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Posted Jan 31, 2013@bigscary Please make a command that allows you to remove a region post or skip an area. It's interfering with a lot of the player's builds, especially ones already claimed. It spawns a post right in the center of a player's builds.
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Posted Jan 31, 2013@bigscary
Weird. I assume you've poked the Bukkit team about this?
Alternate question. Is there some way to give Population Density control of the *initial* spawn location, like what happens with Essentials Spawn and Multiverse?
About the hosting, valid stuff there. Figured I'd offer since I can't really donate at the moment due to lack of employment.
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Posted Jan 31, 2013For some reason players with the permission 'populationdensity.adminlogin' can't join the server with the reserved slots? I had 5 slots reserved and a donator couldn't join because apparently the server was full with 9/15 players online?
Any ideas?
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Posted Jan 30, 2013@jakimfett
It's already on a three second delay. And when the delay period starts, I send the player the chunk data for the chunk he will be landing in. But some of them still fall out of the world.
It's very kind of you to offer, but with a hosting company, I know I can submit tickets as needed and get a response 24/7, and I know that the service will continue indefinitely. That's why I use a paid service. :)
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Posted Jan 29, 2013@bigscary
Any way you could give us server owners the option of a "teleport delay"? Eg, people spawn in, and wait $teleport_delay number of ticks before teleporting to the currently open region? I think this has something to do with how fast a server can push chunks over a network, because on a server accessed via my LAN or locally, I don't die as often (or sometimes at all) as I do when I access one of my remote or WAN servers.
Other random fact. When a tree or something causes the region post to be generated a ways up in the air, people don't die. I don't know if you could leverage this somehow (a configurable distance that the region posts spawn above the top layer of ground?), but it definitely effects things.
Edit: You said in the plugin description that "I spend $15 dollars per month to maintain a test server for PopulationDensity. If you love this plugin, please consider donating..."
Are you interested in discussing your hosting requirements? I run a minecraft server hosting business on the side. I'd love to support your work by providing you with a server. I use Multicraft, and you'd have FTP access and a decent amount of diskspace. And Jenkins. I have a Jenkins server that is (mostly) idle.
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Posted Jan 29, 2013@jakimfett
Yeah sorry, I've tried SO many ways to work around that problem, but haven't come up with anything. I understand it's an annoying problem, and I would fix it if I could.
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Posted Jan 28, 2013@bigscary
I take it that your response to @firelook means that my reporting players dying underground (or falling into the void) on first join would be redundant?
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Posted Jan 28, 2013@SyncCraft
Yeah, that's possible. I don't know the details about how spawning is supposed to work with essentials.
@deseven
I don't think it's been done. Maybe you'd like to make one? :)
@firelook
I guess you're talking about falling out of the world? No sorry, I've tried for months to find a workaround. It's either a Bukkit or Mojang bug, which happens if you teleport a player shortly after he joins the server for the first time.
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Posted Jan 26, 2013is their a way to check that is safe to enter the world, and not starting in the ground (which happen ;) )
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Posted Jan 26, 2013and another suggestion - it would be nice to name the region automatically, based on some kind of a simple name generator or on a dictionary
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Posted Jan 26, 2013Another nice plugin from you, great! By the way, what about the dynmap plugin for it?
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Posted Jan 26, 2013@bigscary
It's not, because /homeregion takes them to the home region.. Also, I've now disabled them spawning in the homeregion on first join, and disabled /cityregion from the world (In the config I made it '' again). They still spawn in a random position in the spawn, so I can only assume it's something wrong with essentials spawning?
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Posted Jan 25, 2013@SyncCraft
Maybe home region IS spawn region right now? See if it changes when you do /addregion.
@Shybella
Look through the files list (blue link at top of page) to find the latest version which is compatible with Minecraft 1.2.5. That's the best one you can use with Tekkit.