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 Apr 17, 2012I tried this plugin a few different times the other day, with different versions of bukkit devs... No matter what I did, it always said the same error. "An internal error has occurred".
It only said this when I tried to do any command on this plugin...
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Posted Apr 17, 2012@mumblerit
Okay, I like your spin on it. :) Now any guesses as to what the limit for mobs and discarded items should be per region? Or per chunk?
Since I'm only scanning the newest region, though, if somebody makes a mess in an older region, it won't get cleaned up.
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Posted Apr 17, 2012@zedadiaswick
Ah, I see. Well I've minimized lag as much as I think is possible. The recommendation (for all servers, not just those running PD) is to have at least 500mb of RAM for each player slot. If you're under that threshold, then that may be your problem.
@Zefram
Sorry Zefram, it happens. If you have the buildanywhere permission, then you can edit near the region post. Give yourself thatpermission, or ask an admin on your server to grant it so that you can continue to build in your area.
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Posted Apr 16, 2012but i can't build I have not been completed my sky town
i can't Put anything
Because Region build in my Grief Prevention claim
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Posted Apr 16, 2012@bigscary
I may have been over-zealous in my statement of lag. A more accurate description would be to say in the console I can see the [SEVERE] Server is overloaded messagess during the entire length of the scan, and players call out lag during this period intermittently. I've noticed the block-placement lag myself, but not checked this regularly. So I'm only going by my players' complaints.
The lag may not be entirely at fault of Population Density, my server experiences lag which I attribute to Logblock at peak times too. My server is just a little bit underpowered to be reliable with the plugins I wish to use (just waiting on upgrading once we're more established). So ideally I would like to avoid any unnecessary load on the server.
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Posted Apr 16, 2012@bigscary
it would be for managing mob populations, players with large farms/mobspawners get a glut of mobs in a very small area.
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Posted Apr 16, 2012@zedadiaswick
You can do this, but you have to configure it by setting your "city world" config variable. Check the administrative details page.
5 minutes of lag? What? The very first scan should take a while, but after that, scans just give like 5 seconds of lag at most. Are you having lengthy lag every time you restart your server? Try logging in immediately and moving around - you should see animals and creatures moving about, and you should be able to break and place blocks with no problem even during the scan.
@mumblerit
I can see the advantage, I know sometimes there's a mess created, especially where explosives and/or griefers are involved. I'm not sure it's a feature-fit, though, for a plugin about managing the population? What do you think, M?
@Zefram
You can't delete a region. If you'd like to move that post up higher, then:
The post will rebuild on top of the platform you built above it. If this is currently your newest region and you just don't want new players starting at that post, use /addregion to open a new one instead.
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Posted Apr 16, 2012how to delete region?
he build in my sky town
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Posted Apr 15, 2012So.. long time no speak, still lovin the plugin, we created a command called /village that equals homeregion, less confusing for little kids.
As far as the mob stuff that you had talked about before, is there any way to scan for large amounts of mobs in a small area? lets say once an hour a scan is done on all entities and if theres huge amounts of entities in a restricted area they are killed?
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Posted Apr 14, 2012@bigscary
Thanks!
Also, in your reply to Gikon you seem to suggest that it should be possible for players to teleport from the spawn area to region posts, but my players do not seem to be able to do this... I've not tested it extensively, I just assumed this wasn't an implemented feature. But I'll double check this (I didn't even realise this to be the case for a while, as I can teleport from anywhere as an OP)
Also also, Is it possible to not have it re-scan the region on a reload? Scanning causes major lag on my server, and I would like to be able to reload without causing 5 minutes of lag for my players.
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Posted Apr 13, 2012@Gikon
For your city / spawn area do this:
1. Set the spawn for that world wher eyou want the post to be.
2. Configure PD's "city world" with that world's name.
3. Manually build an imitation post at the spawn.
Now players can use /cityregion or /spawnregion to jump to that post, and may teleport from it as well.
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Posted Apr 13, 2012Love the plugin, fantastic work and implementation mate. :)
However, the ability to control where the region spawns are would be fantastic. I have an existing city/spawn area that I'd love the post to be located in. Is this possible currently? If not, can this be added?
Thanks :)
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Posted Apr 11, 2012Ballsdeep? o.O
Thanks for the update :-)
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Posted Apr 11, 20122.7.1 Fixes
@Ensizion
SPBlat is right, that's normal. Probably the first few regions didn't have enough trees, or had way too much player build already. Fly around them and have a look for confirmation.
@zedadiaswick
Fixed, sorry. :)
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Posted Apr 11, 2012It did that on my world too, for good reason. The first couple of regions it picked were not suitable for settlements; not enough resources around.
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Posted Apr 11, 2012Seriously, it just keeps opening up region after region after region after region, i think its done like 4 regions so far on this new world?
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Posted Apr 10, 2012I have a pretty urgent issue, which I THINK is likely caused by Population Density; though I have not been able to confirm.
If a player places a chest on grass, it will disappear at some point. There was a lot of tall grass in the area, including covering the spot the chests once were. My suspicion is that the grass is growing, and replacing the chest. I believe this plugin creates tall grass to give players enough opportunity to gather seeds? Which is why I am thinking it is to blame. Any chance on a confirmation of whether I am correct, and a fix if appropriate?
Thanks otherwise, though my server is only small at the moment, this plugin is working out well so far otherwise :) Everyone loves the idea of it.
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Posted Apr 9, 2012@groszyk
Assuming you have respawn in home region enabled (it's on by default), they'll also respawn at their "home" post when they don't have a bed.
Neither of them will lag you. They're as efficient as they can be, given their feature sets. In particular, I'm running Grief Prevention on a 1GB server with 400+ claims and no noticeable performance impact.
EDIT: While popdensity scans, you may get a very short (measured in seconds) lag. This happens only once per six hours, though.
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Posted Apr 8, 2012Oh yes also, do his plugins take up a lot of RAM/CPU?
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Posted Apr 8, 2012Wow, his other plugin is absolutely phenomenal! Bigscary, your plugins are the best I have ever seen. Hats off to you :).