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 Jul 26, 2013@Luficer
I have another question for you, can Population Density detect worldguard region's?
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Posted Jul 26, 2013@kymotsujason
It can only manage one world at a time, but you can also set a CityWorld, which is just a cetralized spawn location. I did try to add multi-world support, but ran into a few complications concerning spawning and certain teleportation commands. It would also increase stress on the server during scan times. So for the time being, only a single world.
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Posted Jul 26, 2013@Luficer
Thank you for the fast response.
One question I have about the capabilities though, is Population Density able to manage 2 worlds at a time? or is it programmed for only one world?
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Posted Jul 26, 2013@kymotsujason
Not exactly. I thought about waiting until Bukkit updates again since it works well with 1.6 already, but if I get enough done with it before then, I may go ahead and release it. As with most bukkit plugins, there isn't really much of a schedule XD Even if I do update though, there's no need for you to update if you don't want. The old files will still be availble for download from the Files page.
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Posted Jul 26, 2013@Luficer
Do you have any ETA's on the next release on Population Density?
I am currently running a server that is to be released soon, but I do not want to release it if Population Density is going to update.
Population Density is very important for my server, it'll make things more convenient for my places.
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Posted Jul 26, 2013@P197 This plugin will use a lot of CPU during scans, but that's about it. Scans are only performed on server start and in configurable intervals. Even during scans, I haven't noticed it be too troublesome for players, in my experience.
@makolord1 Ah, yes, I might like to add this. I was already considering disabling mob spawning in the protection radius (especially troublesome on hard-difficulty servers). Feel free to add this to the tickets page! I refer to it almost as a to-do list whereas the comments may get moved too far down XD
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Posted Jul 26, 2013How about pvp protection in the region spawns?
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Posted Jul 26, 2013This plugin is not CPU intensive, right?
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Posted Jul 20, 2013@JerryFord
Teleporting while riding in any sort of vehicle has proven to be very buggy before. This may not be entirely possible without introducing several new bugs, if in fact Bukkit hasn't prevented teleporting entirely while in vehicles.
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Posted Jul 18, 2013Being able to transport while riding a horse would be helpful. X_Angelz_X would you consider adding that please.
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Posted Jul 18, 2013@typxx
Well, that would essentially not be PopulationDensity at all anymore. This plugin's main objective is to spawn players in a resourceful region, not spawn them in random locations. I don't think I'd write this since it would strip out pretty much everything that is PD, but you might can try looking for other plugins, such as this one:
http://dev.bukkit.org/bukkit-plugins/random-spawn/
Good luck!
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Posted Jul 18, 2013Some friends and me are playing on a private Minecraft Server. We are like 10-12 players and we would like to start a new one, where everyone starts not too close to each other. Last time, we were using this plugin, but actually it's way too complex now for such a little need. All we need is some kind of plugin that sets a new spawnpoint whenever a new player has joined the server, so the next one has to start there. Is there any chance you can make some kind of "light version" which provides just this part?
Would be awesome :D
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Posted Jul 7, 2013@SyncCraft
Bukkit did mention an issue with "entity persistance", so animals despawning may not be a plugin issue at all, but rather just a Bukkit issue. I would like to believe that this would be solved by the time they release 1.6.2
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Posted Jul 5, 2013@X_angelz_X
This code is very well documented and seems straight-forward enough. I think I can handle it XD
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Posted Jul 5, 2013Quick question: What if you're using a border plugin to set a world border? Does this plugin still spawn players outside the set border or does it only check loaded chunks?
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Posted Jul 3, 2013After updating to 1.6, I generated a fresh new world, data files for all plugins etc. I thought everything was fine, but some how players' animals are despawning. I have no idea what could be causing this, other than this plugin. I've changed nothing with this plugin other than refreshing the data files, and I didn't have this problem before.
Is there anyway someone could tell if this is causing the problem, or if it's something else? (Would a full plugin list be useful?)
Thanks for any help.
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Posted Jun 29, 2013What do I do if I don't want to keep one of the regions the plugin found? I just installed it for the first time, and when I type /homeregion it drops me in a place I really don't want people to be building. Can I delete this destination in favor of some of the others that I see have been generated?
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Posted Jun 27, 2013@jbanto
It's really hard to find Dev's out there which are understanding of the Code, not many people really want to try and dive into something which is completely not theirs.
But I will try and find some devs. If you are wanting to maybe come apart of the project PM me, I've grown very busy with my Job at MCProHosting and my Server Quadrantal, it's really taken some time away from being able to even look at Plugins :/
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Posted Jun 24, 2013This plugin is spawning new players under bedrock... ???
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Posted Jun 19, 2013No offense or anything but you should consider getting an extra dev to help you out if life is getting in the way. This isn't the kind of plugin that can be easily replaced or removed, it's an integral part of thousands of servers' gameplay.