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 8, 2013@Calenria
No, but you could turn off teleportation in the config file if you don't want players teleporting around.
@SyncCraft
That's because due to the Bukkit change, the feature was broken. You should now see the login queue working again.
@wilderop
The posts update when the chunk they're in loads. You can force a specific post to rebuild with /addregionpost while standing nearby, force all posts to rebuild with a server restart, or just wait a while.
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Posted Feb 8, 2013@wilderop
I did this too, but it changed upon a restart. Did you restart or just reload?
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Posted Feb 8, 2013@bigscary is there an permission node for /homeregion?
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Posted Feb 8, 2013Hello, I see the custom signs section of config.yml and have tried filling it with stuff, but on reload don't see any changes to the sign posts... How do these work?
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Posted Feb 8, 2013@bigscary
You certainly work quickly :P. Thanks for the fast fix, but can I ask what the login priority does, because I haven't seen any sort of join queue, and my players have not mentioned it, it just tells them the server is full.
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Posted Feb 6, 2013@bigscary
Oh fantastic then, sorry. I was on another server that had this so I wasn't sure
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Posted Feb 6, 20133.6.7 Fixes
@cobra0799
Yes to the first, no to the second. See config file. :)
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Posted Feb 6, 2013is there a way to disable the grass from spawning or delete regions?
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Posted Feb 6, 2013@Calenria
That's due to a bukkit bug, which reports to plugins AIR instead of the actual block for half slabs. Sorry for the trouble, but I can't fix that on my end. :\
@ms0244412
Maybe you're thinking of my other plugin, Grief Prevention. :) This one only protects the posts it builds.
@Bluffer17
I'll check into all that. :)
@SyncCraft
Okay, thanks! I recently learned of a change in Bukkit where player data (including permissions) isn't loaded until the player is actually logged in, so you can imagine where that might be related to your problem. I will investigate and fix (work around).
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Posted Feb 6, 2013@bigscary
I'm using Group Manager and have tried both /mangcheckp <group> populationdensity.adminlogin AND /manucheckp <user> populationdensity.adminlogin. Both have shown that the players have the correct permission, so I just don't know.
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Posted Feb 6, 2013@bigscary
Standart CraftBukkit 1.4.6 R-0.3 I will update server soon, but for now there is problems with grass regrow:
1) Grass regrow in every world, even there PopulationDencity turned off
2) Grass regrow breaks some of non-solid blocks (stairs, halfslabs)
3) Grass regrow works even if mob spawning was canceled! (WorldGuard global flag) Our spawn world is protected from every mob spawn, but it is fully covered with grass because of this.
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Posted Feb 5, 2013@bigscary
Oh, I thought it also protected other peoples builds?
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Posted Feb 5, 2013GrassRegrows: true kills half slabs :(
http://i.imgur.com/ULPk7D4.jpg
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Posted Feb 5, 2013This plugin is pure gold :O It does everything I ever wanted! With Extra hard mode and this, you are officially my new Number 1 Dev :DD
Also please please keep posting your sourcecode :). I have a custom map that ends on borders and 0,0 started somewhere really close to the border so I changed where it starts. :O
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Posted Feb 5, 2013@ms0244412
You can disable the post building in the config file, but the area where players are spawning will always be protected. Otherwise, a griefer will dump a bucket of lava on the spawn point, and then those players won't be able to play until you come clean it up.
@Bluffer17
It could be an issue with that beta build. Try a recommended build? Also are you running standard craftbukkit, or some other flavor like CraftBukkitPlusPlus, Spigot, BukkitForge, MCPC, etc?
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Posted Feb 5, 2013About 5 days ago had troubles with server crashes (about 4-5 times a day). Server crash with no errors in log, no response for connections. After some trying to locate problem found this: (jstuck operation log) http://pastebin.com/4rpsvz73. As result then turened off grass regrow function of PopulationDencity all problems disappeared... Server works without crashes.
CB1.4.6-R0.3, PD 2.6.6
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Posted Feb 4, 2013How would I make it so this plugin would only teleport new players to a empty area filled with resources instead of making everything grief proof and such.
I just want this plugin to teleport new players to an empty area filled with resources, nothing else
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Posted Feb 4, 2013@krisdestruction
It won't help with /randomregion. If you try to do this (world borders, deleting regions) yourself, you'll understand why I haven't done it. The first isn't worth the effort (there are other world border plugins too, once you've managed a dependency on this one), the second is very difficult to implement given the current design (without running the risk of breaking everything).
As for your world in particular, it's in fact not big enough. PD actually scans the content of your world to find resources and space. If it has run outside of your borders, that's because it couldn't find a suitable place inside them (it spirals out from 0,0).
@CraftThatBlock
Lower.
@Pixiyo
One slot is for your reserved slot, one slot is reserved to support your login queue (if you were 100% full, the plugin wouldn't even get to consider whether the player should log in, because Mojang code would not allow the login). If you want to allow 20 players online while keeping 1 reserved slot for an admin, then set your total online allowed to 22.
@ircopdd
I guess you're not running standard CraftBukkit? Please report the issue to your plugin platform developer. This doesn't happen on CraftBukkit.
@SyncCraft
That depends on your permissions plugin. Please check the documentation over there. For example with PermissionsBukkit, the command is something like /permissions dump <playername>.
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Posted Feb 3, 2013@bigscary
How can I test if they have the permission?
And I tested it again tonight, and a donator couldn't log in, but I could (I'm owner and op).
I don't understand.. xD
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Posted Feb 2, 2013http://dev.bukkit.org/paste/7047/
can you fix this?
thanks