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 Does this support WorldGuard and GriefPrevention? I don't want regions being placed at spawn or other WorldGuard areas, nor in the middle of a players claim.
Also, it doesn't seem to support the vanilla 1.8 worldborder. I tested it out and it makes new regions outside of the border. (Yes, there are resources within the border.)
@bigscary
Yaaaaay, big hearth to you <3 !
Thanks for your continued support on this great plugin!
I'm in the process of upgrading my server to MC 1.8, and I'm having an OutOfMemoryError issue with PD during server startup: http://pastie.org/9837267
I also have a heap dump that I could Dropbox you if that would help.
@bigscary
Can't wait! :D
Good news all, my grief prevention todo list is almost blank! That means I will soon be working primarily on PD. I just have to make a video and some images, then I'll be working on much of the following.
@AdvanceGamingNextLvl
The entire plugin could use a performance boosting - there's a lot of opportunity. It's not generally a problem for servers because players don't actively use PD very often, but still it's something I should work on. The comment about /randomregion potentially being a lag problem is real, if the command is abused, and that exploit-ability can be fixed.
@disciple218
Yes and no. No, it doesn't save player data using UUIDs, but yes it has been fixed so that changing your name will not break anything. I do plan to switch it to UUIDs anyway pretty soon.
@kemmeo
Yep, localization/customization for messages is coming.
@christhehill
There's the managed world, where all the regions are. The city world is the one where players teleport to with /cityregion or /spawnregion or /spawn, and if you don't have new players set to spawn in their home regions, then they also start in that city world (at its world spawn point).
You can have the city world and managed world set to the same, in case you have a big cool spawn area built somewhere in the managed world. That's what I do on my test server.
Localisatiooooooon :'3 @bigscary
Does this plugin support UUIDs?
could you add the ability to customize messages for this plugin? Like a messages.yml ?
@christhehill
I believe a city region is somewhat like a spawn region, whereas a managed region is any region that has been named and can be teleported to via random or visiting, etc. The other regions being wilderness regions. Maybe wrong here, I haven't messed with this plugin in a while.
What is the difference between a city region and a managed region?
@bigscary
I'm pretty sure the performance issue isn't caused by the command itself, but the server trying to load a lot of the world in a short amount of time. Though, I could be wrong.
@kemmeo
I'll check into that. Hopefully their source is published.
@AdvanceGamingNextLvl
Sure, I'll fix this - first I'll try just making it as cheap as possible to execute. If that doesn't solve it, then I'll add the cooldown.
Something that seems to happen a lot on my server is players go adventuring, get lost, and have a hard time finding a region post to teleport back home. So I'd like to suggest a /nearestRegion command that tells the player where the nearest region post in there location is (and maybe even face them in that direction?). In fact, it could even be combined with and work as an alias for /whichRegion. (Example message: "You are in the Redstone region. Post is located at x200 z-200.")
One last thing, /randomRegion. I love that it's back but one problem with it (that I believe someone else a long time ago pointed out as well) is people can easily spam the command and cause massive performance issues. Like really, go into a test server and spam (3 to 5 times a second) the command for a bit then check the server's tps, and your see what I mean. So for this I simply suggest adding a cool-down for the command. And a option in the config like "RandomRegionCoooldown: <seconds>" would be very much welcomed.
Thank GODDDDD! Thanks a lot for /randomregion :D
The Firstjoin bug can be solved by having your player do /newsteregion or /homeregion on firstjoin. plugins like FirstJoinPlus allow you to force players to execute that command whene they join for the first time.
however this only works when you have "Teleport from anywhere" set to true
BigScary, can you build this work around into PopulationDensity, at least until you have the time to come up with a proper fix? :)
Thanks a lot!
Hi,
I am setting up a new server. Spigot 1.8 with the only plugin Population Density. When joining the server for the first time I do not spawn at a post but somewhere else. I tried different maps and sometimes I spawn below ground, sometimes in water, but never at a post unless I died. This is not a good first time player join experience. How do I fix this?
Edit:
Found out that setting the world spawn point as first user joining the server fixes the problem. At least it is usable now on a new server! Thanks!
4.5 Updates
@bigscary
OMG THANKS :D
@dutchrastacraft
This week, I promise. :)
@cillic1052
Yes, but players aren't forced to use /randomregion. It's just a slash command they can use if they want to hop over to a totally random other region. Players will still be assigned an initial home region based on population and available resources.
I'm sad to see no /randomregion yet :/ Hopefully you'll consider adding it soon.
Happy holidays!