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 28, 2013What do these settings mean?
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Posted Feb 27, 2013@mafima
I'll check the code or ask bigscary.
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Posted Feb 27, 2013Does this plugin has multiverse support? i want one world with monster one without monsters!
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Posted Feb 26, 2013@Leet4044
In future 3.7.3 or higher ill start making sure outposts can't be placed in places that are protected. 3.7.2 fixes needing java 7 to run & makes sure these posts cant be placed in towns
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Posted Feb 25, 2013@DiegoDAC
Use Java JDK 7.
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Posted Feb 25, 2013Will this plugin work with Towny? Because I don't want players respawning right near a town.
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Posted Feb 25, 2013I have this error, and the plugin dont start... any idea why?
http://pastie.org/6333428
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Posted Feb 23, 2013Hey, just a quick note:
In the current version, the plugin jarfile is misspelled: PopulatonDensity.jar instead of PopulationDensity.jar
Just so you know!
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Posted Feb 23, 2013How to set up the config, that there are worlds where NO monsters were spawned?
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Posted Feb 22, 2013@dxwarlock Since its really a vanilla/bukkit problem I would have to set the y value of where they spawn higher.
@Semajnad
i'll try and compile the 3.7.0 in bukkit 1.2.5. But it could be cause the command was prob still a work in progress at the time
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Posted Feb 22, 2013I'm trying to run this of Tekkit 1.3.2 which uses 1.2.5. I've downloaded the 1.2.5 Population Density Jar and I'm getting this error when using commands: Here is an example:
http://pastie.org/6318979
I'm not sure if you have any support for older version compatible with Tekkit, but I'd love to use it, thanks for any help, -Daniel
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Posted Feb 22, 2013I cant seem to find any documentation for how it determines if the region is underwater.
My issue is my map is largely water (about 50%) and my very first region it spotted as useful does have the resources, but they are scattered around the edge. But thats not a problem... The problem comes in is the spawnpoint of the region is directly above water..so new players login, get dropped into the water and sink to the bottom, to drowned before they realize this.
Anyway to correct this?
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Posted Feb 20, 2013Hey, thanks for the response, but I'm having an issue I can't quite get past. I want players to have access to /homeregion and /cityregion only, which the documentation says is possibly, but I can't get it to work. Any suggestions?
Here's the relevant parts of my config: NewPlayersSpawnInHomeRegion: false RespawnInHomeRegion: true CityWorldName: city AllowTeleportation: false TeleportFromAnywhere: true MaxDistanceFromSpawnToUseHomeRegion: 10
What I thought: This would disable all teleports but homeregion and cityregion, but make them usable from anywhere.
What I got: Can use homeregion, cityregion, visitregion, and acceptregioninvite from anywhere.
I also tried this:
NewPlayersSpawnInHomeRegion: false RespawnInHomeRegion: true CityWorldName: city AllowTeleportation: false TeleportFromAnywhere: false MaxDistanceFromSpawnToUseHomeRegion: 25
What I expected: Only homeregion and cityregion, while standing on the region post
What I got: cityregion from landing post works, homeregion from city only displays "you can't teleport from here" and rest are disabled.
After this I tried setting the maxdistance to 25,000 and it still doesn't work.
Thanks in advance.
Dug through some code: If teleportFromAnywhere is true the function playerCanTeleport(Player, boolean) returns a true, doesn't check teleports are disabled first (Solves my first setup).
The function nearCityPost(Player) compares two worlds with equals(), which is unreliable. Changing it to compare by world name fixed my second issue.
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Posted Feb 20, 2013@Raemis Not really maybe ill make some random things with roofs and windows etc. And whatever one gets most votes ill set it to be the new outpost.
@NordicBlue I'll look into it. I'll have to look at the worldguards api.. Tried a bit today never noticed anything right away to do it
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Posted Feb 20, 2013Any way to hook this up to WorldGuard? So it checks if a region is protected before placing a new region there and spawning new players in?
To prevent new players from spawning in a WorldGuard protected region where they cannot do anything.
I already have a somewhat crowded map, and I don't want the plugin to make a region out of an area already occupied/protected.
My Dynmap is here: http://mc.exiledgaming.net:8123/
I only want the plugin to use the unbuild regions,will it do that?
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Posted Feb 19, 2013@McAvarice
Thanks :)
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Posted Feb 19, 2013Is there a way to customize the region posts, to make them shelter newly spawned players a bit more?
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Posted Feb 19, 2013@zedadiaswick
I'll have to start looking at the login queue and check how he does it all
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Posted Feb 19, 2013@McAvarice
Yeah, something like that would be great. /upgradeloginpriority Borlea 25 (Bigscary's commands have always been nice and verbose :P) /downgradeloginpriority Borlea 0.
Then probably best keeping /loginpriority as is, to avoid confusion.
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Posted Feb 19, 2013@zedadiaswick
So you want a command like /loginpriority set Borlea 25. But if his old LoginPriority was 30 it would deny it?. And if I put it your way. on vote sets Timmy's loginpriority to 1. He donates it goes to 25. He votes. It does nothing. No console message nothing. No LoginPriority change. I might have to set an additional letter or something to this command to make it so people arn't like why the hell is this guys LoginPriority not going down
Maybe /loginpriority set up Borlea 25? It would only let you change it to a higher value. And /loginpriority set down Borlea 1 Would allow it to be set to 1.
(tried to fix all my priority misspells.)