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.
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Got a question, suggestion, or problem? Post it on the issue tracker.

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Posted Dec 20, 2013@Luficer
Update pleaase :)
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Posted Dec 20, 2013With the Beta out now on bukkit....any ETA on when you'll update for 1.7? :D
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Posted Dec 20, 2013@agonizedchain
Nupe, there's been a few requests for this, but into the nitty gritty of it, it starts to not make sense. The best way to handle this is to install Bungee and use seperate instances of GriefPrevention
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Posted Dec 17, 2013can you set populationdensity to run on more than one world?
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Posted Dec 15, 2013@sephkurai
ahh, I see. I did plan to add an option for that, but haven't had much time to do much work on it recently.
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Posted Dec 13, 2013@Luficer
Yeah, I made it 24 hours. The problem is it scans when the server restarts and there is no way to stop it. I restart my server frequently to update plugins and mods.
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Posted Dec 13, 2013@sephkurai
Just adjust the hours between scans, which lets you make the scans less frequent, although I can't much make he scanning less intensive XD It essence, it's just looping through thosands of blocks, and counting what kinds of blocks they are.
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Posted Dec 12, 2013I like to use this plugin even though I don't have a large server. Needless to say, because of this I don't need the plugin constantly lagging out my server scanning the regions. How do I stop it or at least minimize it?
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Posted Dec 10, 2013@Luficer
"It appears that PopulationDensity still works on 1.7 as it should, conveniently enough. The scanning may need to be adjusted to accomodate some of the newer blocks, but it works well as is so far. Please report any bugs you find on it for 1.7 in the tickets, thanks!"
Hi Lucifer,
I've fired this up on two 1.7.2 maps, with the following results:
First map - everything seems fine, Most of the biomes around the 200,200 coordinates are coincidentally from pre-1.7.2 (plains, extreme hills, ocean).
Second map - first 6 regions rejected due to Player Blocks being too high. Brand new maps so Player Blocks should be zero, must be counting the new 1.7.2 blocks as the surrounding biomes are 'mesa', 'mesa plateau', 'savanna'.
Have posted a ticket. Looking forward to a fix so I can release a new map with the new biomes to my players. Thanks for your efforts.
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Posted Dec 8, 2013@agonizedchain
nvm it works fine ..thanks will now try it out with players :) I used 'myworldname'
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Posted Dec 7, 2013if u use multiverse will this generate in all worlds or only the named world? when you add the named world is it 'xworld' or xworld to clarify do I need to put the world name in ' '
thanks
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Posted Dec 7, 2013People can't use /randomregion because they are too far from the main region or something... I tried setting that option in the config on -1, 0 and 99999999 but none of them worked... is there any way to remove or disable this option?
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Posted Dec 3, 2013It appears that PopulationDensity still works on 1.7 as it should, conveniently enough. The scanning may need to be adjusted to accomodate some of the newer blocks, but it works well as is so far. Please report any bugs you find on it for 1.7 in the tickets, thanks!
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Posted Oct 25, 2013@Smac3223
Been debating about that. I may just take what's currently released now and update that, then continue my version until it's properly functional. But either way, I will try to get this updated ASAP when Bukkit catches up. I can't imagine that this update will leave this plugin functional since it was a rather complex update.
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Posted Oct 25, 2013Far as I can recall we never had to worry too much about PD when it came to minecraft updating. Though with the changes you wanted to implement, is waiting for a stable 1.7 release mandatory or will there be an update as soon as you're done working on it?
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Posted Oct 23, 2013@DavidCallanan
I do intend to add more permissions to the next version and using Vault to support multiple permission managers, but I haven't thoroughly thought out too many new permission yet. I was thinking of working out some of that with the 1.7 update whenever Bukkit gets around to that.
@dartholomew
No problem. I'll reply on the ticket in a bit XD
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Posted Oct 22, 2013Hi Lucifer, is it possible to keep the markers from spawning in the middle of water/ocean? Not a great place for a region marker lol Thanks. Also want to add that I did not see the ticket about this when I posted. Sorry for that, I am running FTB Unleashed and getting posts spawning in the water as well. Thanks in advance, I hope there will be something you can do for this. It's a great plugin!
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Posted Oct 22, 2013Would it be possible to add permissions to this. If there were permissions players would have to be come a group first for example member, and then they'll have permission for certain command so then they will get teleported to random area on world when they are a certain group?
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Posted Oct 8, 2013@Eelviny
I haven't modified the license at all, so you may need to refer to it. I believe it would just need a copy of the license, and copyright notices, but otherwise, open source.
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Posted Oct 7, 2013Hey, am I allowed to have a developer fork this plugin and use the modified version only on my servers? Basically I just want a really slimmed-down version of the plugin made for me.