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 Mar 21, 2013@n00bsaus
What version are you using? It might not be working for one of the updated builds of bukkit might have to fix some things, I really haven't had many complaints and it seems to be working fine for me :/ Unsure if I can recreate the problem you are having.
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Posted Mar 21, 2013Turns out not, it's just intermittent. My server (Bukkit & Spigot) is crashing when it attempts to scan for resources in an area. Using PopulationDensity 3.7.4. It loaded the server only a few times successfully, but most of the time it says 'scanning region "name" at 0 1 then Spigot throws a hundred errors saying the server has crashed. It only started acting up when I installed PopulationDensity. Do PopulationDensity and Spigot not play well together?
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Posted Mar 21, 2013Config Error - I found and fixed it. Disregard this comment.
Thanks for the awesome plugin.
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Posted Mar 20, 2013@mobilephone2003
You are running multiverse aswell? The plugins may conflict with each other, I will run a test to check and see if they do.
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Posted Mar 20, 2013Not sure what i'm doing wrong, but with the current config, new players still spawn in the default world (not the world specified in the config):
http://pastie.org/private/vew4jhxl9htphzcfngcia
I use essentials with default home as none, and multiverse with firstspawnoverride false
edit: Hmm, maybe I'm reading this wrong, but I echo the comments of having a lite version, just teleporting players to a random area of the map where resources are plentiful
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Posted Mar 19, 2013@X_angelz_X
Working fine for me! Can't wait to get that post moving ability. Thanks for your work.
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Posted Mar 19, 2013@gbww
Ahh good, glad you got it working. xD I was scared for a moment, I was like... The whole plugin can't be not working? Lol.. xD
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Posted Mar 19, 2013Every time I start this plugin it crashes the JVM:
EDIT: If I start the server with more RAM allocated, it takes a little longer, but still crashes. Here is another log:
10:52:20 [INFO] PopDensity: Examining available resources in region "0 0"... 10:52:30 [WARNING] [PopulationDensity] Task #41 for PopulationDensity v3.7.4 generated an exception java.lang.ClassCastException: org.bukkit.craftbukkit.v1_5_R1.block.CraftBlockState cannot be cast to org.bukkit.block.Sign at me.ryanhamshire.PopulationDensity.DataStore.AddRegionPost(DataStore.java:595) at me.ryanhamshire.PopulationDensity.AddRegionPostTask.run(AddRegionPostTask.java:17) at org.bukkit.craftbukkit.v1_5_R1.scheduler.CraftTask.run(CraftTask.java:53) at org.bukkit.craftbukkit.v1_5_R1.scheduler.CraftScheduler.mainThreadHeartbeat(CraftScheduler.java:344) at net.minecraft.server.v1_5_R1.MinecraftServer.r(MinecraftServer.java:512) at net.minecraft.server.v1_5_R1.DedicatedServer.r(DedicatedServer.java:225) at net.minecraft.server.v1_5_R1.MinecraftServer.q(MinecraftServer.java:476) at net.minecraft.server.v1_5_R1.MinecraftServer.run(MinecraftServer.java:409) at net.minecraft.server.v1_5_R1.ThreadServerApplication.run(SourceFile:573) 10:52:31 [INFO] /67.43.7.19:42824 lost connection
The last bit isn't even written to the server.log, it's just what happens when Java terminates.
EDIT 2: Updated to sun java. Now it works fine.
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Posted Mar 19, 2013How do I set a city/spawn region?
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Posted Mar 17, 2013@X_angelz_X
I've just seen what you've written below.
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Posted Mar 17, 2013@nicholasooo
You saw the edits right?
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Posted Mar 17, 2013@X_angelz_X
Haha, I gotcha. Keep up the good work and thanks for all you do.
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Posted Mar 17, 2013@nicholasooo
Well, I'd totally love to give out a " dev link " but I'd prefer not to, because then I could have server owners up my ass saying that I am putting in malicious things inside the plugin, as I can see,
It should be approved soon :/
EDIT: I will yell at one of the BukkitDev staffs in a moment, if it hits 20 hours. EDIT2: I am unsure if you are able to click this link, but you may try... http://dev.bukkit.org/server-mods/population-density/files/56-population-density-v3-7-4/
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Posted Mar 17, 2013@X_angelz_X
Where can we download the working builds until the are released here?
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Posted Mar 16, 2013@Mortalsinn
Ahh yes the dreaded, " This version isn't compatible " xD Yeah I am working on the updated build as we speak, it's been taking me probably a bit longer than what you all are used to, but I am trying to get a feel for his code and understand every line. Now this has been working out quiet well for me, I've managed to fix a few things for you all that I know you all definitely have been waiting for. Like the que's not working and then as nicholasooo said adding in a bit of new features like moving the /cityregion :)
@nicholasooo
There will be a fix for this in the next update :) D/w it's just taking me a bit of time to update everything correctly due to me having had to learn the code on a bridge of time span ( aka an inter-medium from 1.4.7 to 1.5 )
EDIT: Released a working build for 1.5, on the build craftbukkit-1.5-R0.1-20130315.192915-2 (second build release of craftbukkit) still working on the known issues, they will be released in V3.7.5 of PopulationDensity :)
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Posted Mar 16, 2013@X_angelz_X
My suggestion would be to add the ability to move the spawn point of the /cityregion (including the post). I know mine happens to sit in the middle of the ocean, so I'm still using /spawn from essentials until this is fixed.
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Posted Mar 15, 2013using a 1.5 server I get this error with Population Density 3.7.2 - now I know this isn't a "1.5 version" but I wanted to test and post errors to help yah out with updating
When running the scan it gets to a certain region and then crashes with this error. Now at the center of my map I have a Skylands type deal with tons of open "Void" would that be an issue?
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Posted Mar 13, 2013@mumblerit
Hmm, I'll look into it. Unsure what the problem could be, if it's still there when I finish updating to 1.5 then be sure to let me know :)
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Posted Mar 13, 2013@X_angelz_X
i believe we are also recently dealing with the issue syncraft mentioned.
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Posted Mar 13, 2013@SyncCraft
Well SyncCraft, I do think the plugin checks the see if the land which you are being teleported to has been occupied whatsoever or not, try doing this.
1. Build some stuff on that one region which it keeps taking you back to, and retype the command again and see if it teleports you to a new region.
Also, if the signs are not customizable, I could always add something into the config to make it where each sign can have what you want on it :)