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.
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.
Got a question, suggestion, or problem? Post it on the issue tracker.
@bigscary
How does one get to a named region that isn't wilderness?
Also does those named regions have diamonds? Or are they like open regions without diamond?
@Dudescast
No, living in a region doesn't mean you "own" it. It just means that region is where you're allowed to mine and build. Population Density is NOT a grief prevention plugin, though it does help reduce build/break grief a little by containing it (restricting it to a region). It does nothing for theft.
Let me summarize how that part works. Wilderness regions and the currently "open" region (where new players are currently starting) never require an invitation to join. All the other named regions (not wilderness, and not the open region) require an invitation, but the invitation may come from ANY player who already lives there. This makes griefing an established region difficult, unless you have an accomplice who already lives in the region you want to grief, or you can convince a stranger to invite you. This "anti grief" functionality is really just a side-effect. This part of Population Density is actually designed to control resources and space, and it's just a bonus that it deters griefing a little.
I'm working on a new plugin called "Grief Prevention" which will solve your grief problems, but it's not finished, yet. You can find it here on BukkitDev. As for complete plugins which will help you combat grief, I suggest either Precious Stones or Residence. They're a little difficult to learn and use (for players) but they do a pretty good job of preventing the most common kinds of grief, including both theft and build/break. However you should know that they aren't "anti grief" plugins either, and so you still need to download additional plugins to combat specific types of grief like forest fires, lava dumps, spam, and tree-topping.
@bigscary
But I thought that if one desided to move into a region that isn't the spawn, then they would own it, and only if they allow others they could move in. But as it is they can just go and move in to your region and start griefing... Also chests are not protected right?
This is how my config looks:
PopulationDensity:
NewPlayersSpawnInHomeRegion: true
RespawnInHomeRegion: true
CityWorldName: ''
AllowTeleportation: true
TeleportFromAnywhere: false
BuildBreakAnywhere: false
MoveInRequiresInvitation: true
MaxDistanceFromSpawnToUseHomeRegion: 25
ManagedWorldName: DudesCast
@Dudescast
Yep, that's the intended behavior. It doesn't hurt anything for them to move into wilderness regions - true it spreads the players out a little, but the point is that they travel >200 blocks out into the wilderness because they choose to, not because they have to due to crowding where they spawned.
It's important to keep the "can move to another region immediately after joining the server" functionality in place, because that's what allows players who are friends to build together. Without it, two friends joining at different times might find themselves far apart, without any option to build together.
Hello, I just started up a server with this, and people started moving into wilderness, but they regions don't get protected, I mean yes people can't mine, but they can move in without a invite. Is that supossed to be like that?
@Vermino2004
Haha thanks Vermin, I'm glad you like it. After playing on a few servers and experiencing the "I'm lost in a huge city, can't find a place to build, starving, and all alone", I was highly motivated to code this. :)
@Galexrt
If you want new players to spawn at the spawn rather than in their home region, then there's a config option for that. Just set "new players spawn in home region" to false. Now they'll pop-in at your default world's spawn, and they can use /homeregion when they're ready to start adventuring.
As for Towny support, I recommend installing Towny? I'm not sure I understand your requirement. Maybe if you provided some more details?
@deleted_7036002
That sounds like creating work for yourself (managing those permissions) rather than eliminating it, which is one of the aims of this plugin. :) If I can think of a clean, simple way to integrate that functionality, I'll do it. No guarantees.
@Galexrt
Well you could do all that if there was support for this plugin only working on people with a permission and not just everyone. So my builders get a place to live but guests carry on spawning at the spawn.
Hi I'm requesting that its so a new player spawns and is first at spawn. If the player walks to the end of the spawn he will be teleported to a nice place.(Maybe with Stargate compatible that i can make a gate the players walk through and get teleported to a nice place.
And maybe Towny Support that a player pays for a area and then a town will be created for him.(Do you know what i mean??)
you got to be kidding me? you read my fricken mind on this plugin.. i'm like "i need a residency plugin but something the spawns them in the wilderness randomly + around others"
kudos, I'm going to do some testing with this - but very VERY awesome
Great idea!
Fixed a bug with region naming which resulted in too-similar names after the first 80 or so regions. Thanks again, Mumblerit! Everybody go check out his server (muttsworldmine.com)! :)
Strange - I have notifications about new comments posted here, but I don't see them displayed. Anyway...
Nope, region names aren't customizable. However if you'd like to suggest some which are easy to spell and reasonably fit with Minecraft, I'd be happy to add them to the current list.
There's no way (currently) to prevent moving into wilderness regions. I wonder why do you want to do that?
Hey everybody, I've just published an alpha release of my next project, an easy-to-use plugin to prevent nearly all grief with near-zero administrative overhead. If you have time, please have a look and post your feedback - as with Population Density, I'll be incorporating community feedback into Grief Prevention to make it as awesome as it can be. :)
http://dev.bukkit.org/server-mods/grief-prevention/
@bigscary
Well not just to change the sign post, I'm most likely going to make a few modifications to teleporting, and add a spout plugin that displays the current region. Ideally I would like to migrate all my server's programming into one plugin.
@LordBoos
Sorry, can't move the posts without adding a giant pile of complexity and hurting performance. Move your ocean (kidding). :) I would say "wood floats", but I just changed the platforms to stone. :\
Can you make so that Posts will not spawn in/above water/lava? Because very often, post is just floating above water and i dont really like that.
Okay, sign fixed, platforms updated to (not flammable) stone, intermittent post placement bug probably fixed. Source is updated.
@rayblasdel
Wow, you're forking my project just to change the region posts? You must REALLY want them changed. :) Do consider that the glowstone is valuable in that it makes them highly visible, especially at night.
@bigscary
Ah so there is a repo, thanks for the heads up. I manually decompiled the jar to view the source code, hence the lack of accurate line numbers. I'm going to have to fork it over on github.
I've actually had the guide post spawn in a lava pool once. But my initial reason was, yes, aesthetic. I wanted them to match the overall style of my main buildings.
Interesting about the missing guide posts. I'll keep an eye on your changes.
@rayblasdel
Ha! Well done, sir. I'll fix that in the next update. :) I'm not sure what you mean by "cracking the jar open", but the source is available via the repository link at the top of this page.
Hey, question - why the concern over post materials? Is it just an aesthetic thing, or something else? I've been considering changing the platform from wood to sandstone or smooth brick because while it's extremely unlikely that a griefer could dump lava to set the platform on fire, there's still the possibility that the post will land in an existing lava pool when it's created.
Also for anyone listening in - I think I have a fix for that intermittent issue with the posts not appearing (they're being created in the void by mistake). I'll also include that potential fix in the next update.