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 Aug 27, 2013@Luficer
You would say, that there is no protection, then I turn post generation off? Should I try seting these false?
I am curious what is the configuration which won't touch the world in any way, no protection, modification, teleportation, just the sweet, clever playerspawning? :)
Your landmark idea isn't holds, it happened to already working quarrys. Server restarted, and it looked like someone just picked them up, and placed down again, with the yellow/black original 9*9 markers - but curiously the old orange frames which keep the bore head on remained, not disappeared slowly, like they would.
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Posted Aug 27, 2013@sbl03
Well, as for the floor, it's possible to recode it not to regenerate the floor, but I'd certainly see that being problematic. Mainly because players may land on an un-safe material, and secondly is that the plugin checks for certain materials when determining where to regenerate the post.
Multiple materials will generate it seems, although it may not be entirely intentional. I haven't actually changed the post generation too much, but looking at the code, it only sets the block's 'type', which I think may possibly retain the block's previous 'data' value, which would cause the smooth brick to change to chisled or mossy bricks. Might test this later. *EDIT* I've confirmed that this is indeed what it does.
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Posted Aug 27, 2013Thank you for continuing to maintain this plugin! I have a question, and possibly a suggestion. Is it possible to prevent the floor that the post is on from re-generating? Also, when it does (re)generate, can it be ONLY one material? Occasionally, it generates with the rare chiseled blocks.
Thanks!
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Posted Aug 27, 2013@Normalius
It seems I've reproduced the problem, but I don't have MCPC or PD installed yet. I think this is just an failure to place the land mark on the appropriate side of the quarry.
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Posted Aug 27, 2013@Normalius
I'll try to set up a test FTBU server on my PC here and see if PD will interefere with quarries and/or quarry landmarks without other plugins. The problem seems a bit unclear, but I'll see if I notice anything out of the ordinary and try to confirm it
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Posted Aug 26, 2013Your plugin sounded and worked wonderful. Population Density V3.8 I opted in the config for NO posts, and No teleportation, just sorting players around the world, and changed rescanning from 6h to 48h. I left your other options at default.
Sorry to report, but my FTB 1.1.3 Unleashed server (MC1.5.2) with mcpc-plus-1.5.2-R1.1-forge738-B639 kept forgetting quarry areas till I removed your plugin.
I do not know what interferedwith working quarrys' landmarked areas, but when I restarted the server they just sat there, stopped, and basic 9*9 unlandmarked area selected my the striped lines.
Hope this helps?
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Posted Aug 10, 2013@Luficer
Thanks man, I appreciate it.
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Posted Aug 10, 2013@PandazNWafflez
Finally put it in my own repo. It's now at PopulationDensity
If there's any issues with that repo, let me know. First repo I've bothered doing XD
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Posted Aug 9, 2013@kymotsujason Yes, I intend to at any rate. Although I don't think I need to wait for it to update or anything, SK seems to have a fairly stable API.
@PandazNWafflez I will look into it. Currently the source is just compiled into the jar file. BigScary also has an older GitHub repo for this, but it's far out of date I think. I'll probably just create a new one eventually.
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Posted Aug 9, 2013Is it possible that the source for this might be put onto GitHub or a similar site, seeing as this plugin is licensed under the GNU GPL? Just wondering, as it makes it easier for the community to contribute.
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Posted Aug 7, 2013@Luficer
Will you be implementing WG region detection as well?
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Posted Aug 6, 2013@Smac3223
The current version is compatible with 1.6.2. Since it seems stable enough, I may post-pone another release. I've been waiting for GriefPrevention to update (now maintained by Tux and changing the API a bit), so that I can implement a few new features.
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Posted Aug 5, 2013Beta build for 1.6.2 has been out Any ETA on when this'll update or can anyone state if it's compatible?
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Posted Aug 3, 2013@tomaste
With most permission managers, I would like to think that players could have the teleport from anywhere permission only in the CityWorld, but not the managed world, although I've never tried this. I may look into this a bit more or add some extra config options to that end.
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Posted Aug 2, 2013is it possible to allow any of the teleport commands from the cityworld without allowing it from everywhere?
I want to restrict the usage to from region posts, or from anywhere in the cityworld.
Thanks!
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Posted Jul 29, 2013@retricide
This does likely need a multi-world manager. I haven't messed with CityWorld since I picked this plugin up, but I doubt it loads the world, so unless it's world_the_end or world_nether, you probably would need a multi-world manager for it to work. I may or may not allow PD to load specified worlds later depending on the complexity of it.
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Posted Jul 29, 2013How do you setup a CityWorld - do you need a multi-world plugin to manage it?
I have a world named "Spawn" and, in the PopulationDensity config, specified 'Spawn' as the CityWorld, but when I try to execute /cityregion it says there's no cityregion to send me to.
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Posted Jul 28, 2013@jbanto
This issue was supposedly fixed before I picked it up by attempting to load the chunk before spawning the player. I haven't heard about any new issues with this recently either. You can keep track of this ticket if you wish. Feel free to add a comment to it if you have any more issues with it.
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Posted Jul 28, 2013Have you fixed the issue some people were having with it spawning players in the void because the chunks weren't loaded?
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Posted Jul 26, 2013@kymotsujason
It cannot currently. If you have an idea of what to do with region protection integration, you can put something in a ticket and I'll see if I can't itegrate it.