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 Mar 22, 2014Can you add the timer to the teleportation commands?
Like, wait 10 seconds after you enter the command and only if you don't move after 10 seconds you will be teleported?
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Posted Mar 21, 2014@xbenas
I believe that you can just revoke the permission node for /visitregion.
Also, to remedy this problem, you may want to close the regions that they have created, or just rollback the work that they have done. I'd also recommend banning the person(s) that did the deed, as you generally don't want those kinds of people playing on your server anyway.
Finally, you might want to modify the amount of player-made blocks that is required to close a region. I'd set it a bit higher. Tweaking the config just small amounts can fix problems like this.
Just my 2cents.
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Posted Mar 19, 2014Holy sh*t, you are not going to believe how my players abused this system!
You see, regions have names and new region opens up when the current one has enough blocks put in them.
So my players went around building cobblestone stuff on purpose to get a lot of regions and put their shops right next to the region posts or just isolated them completely and only entrance left is their shop, so they basically now have free, infinite warps!
Is there a way to turn off the "names" part absolutely? I don't want to see anyone using /visitregion name ever again.
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Posted Mar 9, 2014Hey guys, Awesome plugins! I've used it some time ago and I just wanted to know; how do the Reserved Slots work? Do they let more people in then there is room for? ( like essentials ) or does it kick a random player to make room for the admin?
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Posted Mar 6, 2014@jkcclemens
I'm sorry if I came across too harsh. I didn't mean to sound angry, I'm just under a lot of stress right now. I didn't know that you were new to the project, and I totally understand that this is probably a hard problem to fix. In the meantime, is there a possible temp-fix? Maybe a setting in the config that allows you to set biomes that PopDens posts don't generate in? Again, I appologize if I sounded rude.
P.S. Didn't mean to leave so suddenly on the IRC, my internet pooped out on me. :)
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Posted Mar 5, 2014Hey, I know you're busy, but I have two questions before I decide whether this plugin is going to work on the server I'm developing:
1) I'm using Towny for the server. Is there any way to prevent the player from settling on or claiming the protected area immediately surrounding the region post? I'm afraid some players are going to settle near the post and then be upset when they're not able to do anything on their land.
2) The configuration w/r/t the posts isn't very well documented. Is there any way I can get rid of the signs that explain the teleport commands? I want to turn off all of those commands, so it would be confusing for players if they're encountering documentation for them all the time.
Thanks!
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Posted Mar 4, 2014Please fix the glitch where posts generate in oceans ASAP. This is really messing up my map, and I need to get my "beta-testing" map done with so I can use my custom map. Right now I don't dare test it on my official map because it has a lot of oceans.
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Posted Mar 1, 2014I agree with @DarkSkript
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Posted Feb 7, 2014-
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Posted Jan 30, 2014Hi Luficer, I have 3 worlds on my server. 1 Survival, 1 Creative, 1 Hub. The hub is where I set spawn using essentials, inside the Hub is 2 portals to either Survival or Creative. Is it possible to make a fix so when players go through the survival portal or creative portal it will randomly spawn them in a different place to spawn? (On first join)
Many thanks, I would really appreciate it if you could add this option :)
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Posted Jan 28, 2014@xbenas
Not sure if you can remove a region, but you can rename it with /nameregion.
Is there any way to remove a regionpost, which hasn't been assigned to a region yet?
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Posted Jan 26, 2014How do I "remove" a name from the region?
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Posted Jan 20, 2014@Luficer
Just a quick note to say thanks for a great plugin - been running it on a new map on my server from the beginning of January this year, and it's made a huge difference to the spawn over-crowding I had on my previous map.
I hope you find the time to keep up the maintenance work, and/or find someone good to take over.
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Posted Jan 19, 2014@xbenas
He probably means lag when the server starts scanning for resources.
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Posted Jan 18, 2014@WsupPanda
Please elaborate, this is running fine on mine.
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Posted Jan 17, 2014Really, really loved this plugin, but unfortunately had to remove it because of the lag it caused. :(
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Posted Jan 15, 2014@stgram
Currently it's not very complicated. It just counts entities in whatever order the server gives them, and removes them after a certain count. Other stuff I don't really remember.
On another note, I'd like to pass this plugin on to someone else. I don't really have much time or focus to put towards this plugin alongside school and owning a server. But please only if you've already written a plugin before, preferrably one that is still active, but not required.
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Posted Jan 13, 2014@Luficer
Could you please provide more specifics about the "mob trimming" feature? How it is performed, what are the parameters, and perhaps a config value for the future?
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Posted Jan 10, 2014@Luficer
Thanks for the update.
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Posted Jan 9, 2014@stgram
I'll look through some of these errors later. Bit occupied as classes are starting again, but will try to sort them out later or let someone else take over the plugin.