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 7, 2014@Rashneish
Not for camping and attacking, but Grief Prevention will do that for you automatically (see link above in plugin recommendations). Yes, the posts are protected from being built around and broken, so no worries about lava buckets creating a hazard or baited creepers destroying the post.
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Posted Aug 7, 2014Hey, how come I'm not a former author anymore? :( I created the thing and coded almost all the features. Give a guy credit!
And thanks for maintaining it. :) If I had to choose between getting credit and ensuring the plugin lives on to make the game better for players, I'd definitely choose the latter. Way to go!
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Posted Jul 14, 2014Are there measures in place to prevent people camping the spawn points or building on/around them? I have looked through config/command references and there doesn't seem to be.
Seems to be a major problem for factions/pvp servers if this is the case...
@PluginBox
Yes. You set the world you'd like the plugin to manage in the plugin's config.
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Posted Jul 8, 2014Does this work with multiworld or multiverse?
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Posted Jul 3, 2014Does this work with multiverse?
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Posted Jun 15, 2014@woolruss
Use a command block.
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Posted May 19, 2014Now whenever someone executed the "/Randomregion" command, it says my config is not setup properly and I need to specify a world to manage, although I never changed it from before and it worked perfectly fine before.
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Posted May 18, 2014By chance will this work on a server running hexxit? It is a 1.5.2 server using mcpc pulse and the hex it mod pack
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Posted May 17, 2014If I disable all of the teleportation-based features, can I make it so that the posts don't appear at all? I dislike them.
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Posted May 15, 2014Does anybody know how to run the /randomregion command with a pressureplate? If you can reply back or PM me I would appreciate it!
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Posted May 14, 2014Is it possible to pick where to put the Posts? We wanted to add this to a prebuilt up world but for us to find every pop density post and move any builds that it placed itself on top of would be a nightmare and wouldnt really be worth it. We would love to be able to place one of these in each biome and name them ourselves. That way players could get right to the biome they want, and if PopDensity is regening materials and such, that is all we need. But the managed mode doesnt let us move any of the posts.
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Posted May 8, 2014@jkcclemens
So glad you took over the project! I hope you'll do a great job at updating it!
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Posted May 5, 2014It's such a shame that they use some kind of half-asses ticket system, I can't even register on it. :(
I really need the ability to set cooldowns for the teleportation commands...
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Posted May 5, 2014???
PopDensity: Examining available resources in region "-1 -1"...
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Posted Apr 13, 2014@dutcholdskool
This "bug" isn't even remotely related to PopulationDensity.
On a side note, @jkcclemens, can you implement a teleportation cooldown and/or timer for every player? Right now it's very easy to crash servers just by teleporting trough a lot of named regions, because the server has to constantly load a lot of chunks.
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Posted Apr 10, 2014Any1 having issues with teleportation and NCP?
[23:36:00] [Server thread/INFO]: [NoCheatPlus] BLAIDESHARP failed SurvivalFly: tried to move from 221.00, 75.00, 2628.00 to 221.00, 75.00, 2628.00 over a distance of 0.00 block(s). VL 1330. [23:36:54] [Server thread/ERROR]: Could not pass event PlayerInteractEntityEvent to GriefPrevention v7.8 org.bukkit.event.EventException at org.bukkit.plugin.java.JavaPluginLoader$1.execute(JavaPluginLoader.java:294) [spigot.jar:git-Spigot-1377] at org.bukkit.plugin.RegisteredListener.callEvent(RegisteredListener.java:62) [spigot.jar:git-Spigot-1377] at org.bukkit.plugin.TimedRegisteredListener.callEvent(TimedRegisteredListener.java:30) [spigot.jar:git-Spigot-1377] at org.bukkit.plugin.SimplePluginManager.fireEvent(SimplePluginManager.java:502) [spigot.jar:git-Spigot-1377] at org.bukkit.plugin.SimplePluginManager.callEvent(SimplePluginManager.java:487) [spigot.jar:git-Spigot-1377] at net.minecraft.server.v1_7_R2.PlayerConnection.a(PlayerConnection.java:1110) [spigot.jar:git-Spigot-1377] at net.minecraft.server.v1_7_R2.PacketPlayInUseEntity.a(SourceFile:55) [spigot.jar:git-Spigot-1377] at net.minecraft.server.v1_7_R2.PacketPlayInUseEntity.handle(SourceFile:10) [spigot.jar:git-Spigot-1377] at net.minecraft.server.v1_7_R2.NetworkManager.a(NetworkManager.java:148) [spigot.jar:git-Spigot-1377] at net.minecraft.server.v1_7_R2.ServerConnection.c(ServerConnection.java:77) [spigot.jar:git-Spigot-1377] at net.minecraft.server.v1_7_R2.MinecraftServer.v(MinecraftServer.java:703) [spigot.jar:git-Spigot-1377] at net.minecraft.server.v1_7_R2.DedicatedServer.v(DedicatedServer.java:273) [spigot.jar:git-Spigot-1377] at net.minecraft.server.v1_7_R2.MinecraftServer.u(MinecraftServer.java:566) [spigot.jar:git-Spigot-1377] at net.minecraft.server.v1_7_R2.MinecraftServer.run(MinecraftServer.java:472) [spigot.jar:git-Spigot-1377] at net.minecraft.server.v1_7_R2.ThreadServerApplication.run(SourceFile:618) [spigot.jar:git-Spigot-1377] Caused by: java.lang.NullPointerException at me.ryanhamshire.GriefPrevention.PlayerEventHandler.onPlayerInteractEntity(PlayerEventHandler.java:2257) [?:?] at sun.reflect.GeneratedMethodAccessor132.invoke(Unknown Source) [?:?] at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:43) [?:1.7.0_51] at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:606) [?:1.7.0_51] at org.bukkit.plugin.java.JavaPluginLoader$1.execute(JavaPluginLoader.java:292) [spigot.jar:git-Spigot-1377] ... 14 more
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Posted Apr 9, 2014Hi. Any update on status of UUID support? Thanks.
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Posted Apr 3, 20143:24:54 AM CONSOLE: ERROR]: Nag author: '<NoAuthorGiven>' of 'PopulationDensity' about the following: This plugin is not properly shutting down its async tasks when it is being reloaded. This may cause conflicts with the newly loaded version of the plugin
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Posted Mar 30, 2014@dutcholdskool
I don't think there's a setting in Essentials for Population Density.
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Posted Mar 29, 2014@xbenas
Or use the Essentials "rules" for teleportation?