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 19, 2013By my understanding, PriorityLogin and EliteLogin no longer work. Are you expecting them to be fixed in future releases?
If not, I'd like to be able to set a player's loginpriority via a command, but for it to ignore a value lower than it's current (as this is how permissions worked with the loginpriority command before). I offer voters a loginpriority of 1, which is set every time a player votes - any donators on loginpriority 25 get their loginpriority reduced to 1 after voting - not great.
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Posted Feb 17, 2013@Pixiyo
I'll look into translations. I'll have to figure out how bukkit can do it easy
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Posted Feb 17, 2013Translations on the sign system would be nice for my users. If possible, dutch.
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Posted Feb 16, 2013@jakimfett
Can you gimme a pastebin of your server startup log?. To see what scans are taking the longest time
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Posted Feb 16, 2013I'd like to request the ability to disable the scan that runs every time when a server restarts. How possible would this be? I don't want to disable all scans, I just don't want to have my server offline for three minutes each time I have to restart it.
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Posted Feb 14, 2013@lukasparsons
Oh it's very cool you made a tutorial. I'm surprised players need it though - don't you think the signs on the posts are sufficient? :)
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Posted Feb 13, 2013@bigscary i noticed that there wasn't a tutorial on this on youtube. and my players on my server are always asking about how it works, so i recorded my own tutorial. check it out in case you'd like to use it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VHziLLTBhA
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Posted Feb 13, 2013@SyncCraft
That's right, what you could do is just add a slot every time you add a reserved slot. You'd just have lots of slots empty most of the time.
Login priorities will do the job very well. It will mean that in the worst case, donators will wait in VERY short lines.
@wilderop
Make sure you have "spawn in home region" set in your config file. It should be that way by default.
@Debzy86
Please check your world name to make sure you typed it exactly right in the config file. Then, if you're using some multi-world plugin (like Multiverse?), be sure your world is "registered" with that plugin. How to do that step will depend on the specific plugin you're using to manage all your worlds.
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Posted Feb 13, 2013Hello! I love the idea of this plugin but I can't seem to get it to work. I have added this into the config file: ManagedWorldName: Wild But when I use any commands in game it states that it hasn't been configured properly and I need to specify a world to manage? I have reset the server and reloaded etc. I'd appreciate the help :)
Debz x
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Posted Feb 12, 2013Hello, I seem to be having a problem where new players don't spawn at the region post at first login. At first login they spawn at the "spawnregion". Is there a way to have them spawn at the newestregion instead while still having a main city?
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Posted Feb 12, 2013@bigscary
Hmm I will double check with my players. Is there any way I could test this myself?
Also, I run a 15 slot server, and give my donators + staff a reserved slot. I've come to realise that as PD doesn't kick players, it reserves slots, reserving a slot for every donator will result in no one being able to get online, right?
Would you recommend using login priorities over reserved slots, or is there another way?
Thanks :)
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Posted Feb 12, 2013@Pixiyo
I posted a fix for that last week. Please make sure you're on the latest version. :)
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Posted Feb 12, 2013@bigscary
No you don't understand me. We've never seen a working queue. The server just says at 99 slots that it's full. No queue...
We have 100 slots.
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Posted Feb 11, 2013Ahh, I too am having all my people fall to their death on first login.
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Posted Feb 11, 2013@bigscary
Thanks for the reply! Is this bug posted somewhere, so that I can say that it affects me?
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Posted Feb 11, 2013@SyncCraft
Any number between 0 and 100, inclusive.
Use either one.
Did you update to the latest version and remember to /reload? And are you sure that player had the log in problem AFTER you did that? I tested my changes to verify they work before I published.
@revslaughter
I'm aware of this issue. I've been trying to fix it for months. It's either a Mojang bug or a Bukkit bug which causes players to fall out of the world when teleported shortly after joining for the first time. It's pretty unfuriating - it's a thorn in my side on my test server. :)
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Posted Feb 10, 2013Hi @bigscary,
Nearly every time a new user joins and is assigned to the current region, they fall out of the world. Since I also use ExtraHardMode, they respawn with limited health/hunger and usually die of starvation. This is a huge turnoff for new folks just finding my server as you can well imagine. Have you seen 'fell out of world' happen much with this plugin, or is it something on my end? I have a performant machine and give my server plenty of memory (max heap of 20GB), and I don't use many other plugins besides yours (Shopkeepers and Trade).
Of course, thanks for your hard (and hopefully enjoyable) work on these amazing plugins. I just wanted to make you aware of this problem, and see if you have any suggestions for me regarding it.
Thanks!
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Posted Feb 8, 2013@bigscary
Can I put whatever number I want in the permissions or is it just the elite and priority logins?
So should I use the permissions or just do it manually with /loginpriority?
EDIT: I just asked a player who couldn't join earlier (server was full) and he didn't get put in any queue, it again just told him the server was full..
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Posted Feb 8, 2013@SyncCraft
The permission does work, it just has a few... umm... caveats that you probably won't notice. Higher priority means jumping ahead of others in the queue. Max priority (100) means they can use reserved slots. All of this is described on the administrative details page linked above.
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Posted Feb 8, 2013@bigscary
Ah, fantastic. Could you possibly explain the login priority thing to me? I assume the higher the priority, the quicker they join? And you mentioned the permission not working for it?
Thanks.