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.
@zlepper
To make it go back to the world spawn, just set "cityworld" in your config file to the world you want to send players to when they use the command.
By the way, /setworldspawn isn't mine - it's a Vanilla command.
@adamk523
Yep, there's wisdom in that.
@bigscary
Happened a few times for this specific post, haven't noticed it in other regions so far.
Also your /spawn command seems to not want to go to world spawn, but rather to whatever the user's home region is. Even after using both essentails /setspawn and your /setworldspawn. That is kinda frustrating. So something to override this would be quite nice.
@bigscary
Even if some screw their servers up, it's better to give admins the freedom to tailor the plugin to many unique needs rather than being a fearsome plugin dictator. ;) Thanks a ton for reconsidering and for your timely responses!
@bigscary
Hmm, indeed. Let me know if I can do anything for you :)
@SPellegrom
That's odd, there's no stack trace in there for my code. :( I will try to wildly guess the reason and fix it.
@zlepper
Yikes, could be a cauldron issue, can't be sure. Do you get this problem all the time for all the posts, or just the one time for this post?
@adamk523
I'm fairly certain I have a good solution to your "posts are sometimes not accessible" problem. I'm working on getting it coded up.
You disagree about the minimums too? Meh... it's a pain in my ass to change it, but I guess it's easy enough to do. I'm willing to bet that more admins will shoot themselves in the feet with these options than will actually improve their player experience. :) On the todo list.
The region size changing is risky (likely to break stuff that's currently working) - I'm procrastinating it for now but it's on the todo list.
Updated to 4.2 and got the following error messages in the server logs: http://p.0xcafeba.be/omiyimafeh.avrasm
Thanks for watching :)
@bigscary
Oh, I forgot to mention, it happened on a cauldron server.
@bigscary
Big thanks for updating!
@bigscary
I meant more that you don't have the option to make it work with every server out there. ;) Even if it's technically not a good idea to change something, the option should still be there for special cases.
Can you increase/decrease the minimums as well? Those seem to be static, as far as I can tell. It's good that you can adjust the maximum player blocks.
I would feel great about that! Who cares if a few dummy posts are left around, they can be cleaned up within time and it wouldn't be a problem for newly generated worlds. Thanks so much for taking it into consideration!
@zlepper
Haha, you're right, that's definitely not the intent. I will try to reproduce that issue and fix it.
There's no command to set city region - see the setup/config page. You need to specify your city world in the config file, and then use something like /setworldspawn to exactly position where you want players to teleport to/from in the city.
I suspect something is wrong here: http://i.imgur.com/iOV7509.png
These was created by the plugin.
Also, what is the command to set the city region?
@adamk523
Do I understand correctly that you're very disappointed that this free software doesn't work perfectly for every server out there? :P
You can change the resource cap by adjusting the density ratio option.
I'll rethink the block breaking/placement rules.
Your request around region size is interesting - I think for most servers, the problem is that all players want to run off into the wilderness, creating the opposite problem where nobody builds where new players can see it. If I were to make region size customizable, there wouldn't be any automatic cleanup of the old posts (but players could break them). How would you feel about that?
@bigscary
What about breaking dirt or stone? The post is literally buried in the side of a cliff, and I had to clear out quite a lot of land to even make it accessible.
This is a great plugin, but it just doesn't have enough configuration options. My server's smaller and more spread out, but the need for a plugin like this has arisen, and it's a major shortcoming of this particular plugin if it can't cater to every server's needs. The inability to change the minimum resource cap and the region sizes is also frustrating, since I have a custom terrain generator for one world and it'd be nice to space the colonies out a little more. I feel like this plugin is a one-size-fits-all, forcing servers to conform around it, rather than an adjustable system that gives the server owner more control. Almost every other plugin goes to great lengths to allow as much customization as possible.
4.2 Updates
@adamk523
If you're using the latest version, he should be able to break leaves, grass, and logs around the post. No, the radius isn't changeable - the size is set with explosions and lava buckets in mind.
@mrelfire
Yes, use commands.yml to set up your aliases. See Bukkit wiki.
@Mwthornj
Oops, sounds like I have a bug. Let me fix that. Teleporting should be allowed from either the managed world or the city world.
I go to the city-world when I use '/cityregion' but when I try to '/home' to get back, it says "You can't teleport from this world." Did I setup something wrong?
@kemmeo
this plugins allways take other essentials for home, i put AllowTeleportation: false, any other ideas ?
@mrelfire
not in the /sethome & /home sense. its /homeregion and /visit, and all centeret around the region posts as opposed to a home set by the player. Either way, Essentials is a very good plugin to have, I'd recommend having it for /sethome & /home and just disabling the teleportation commands in PopulationDensity.
is their a way to no use the home & set home of this plugins, and use instead an other one like (essential) ?
Can admins adjust the amount of protected blocks from a post, or to allow editing of everything but the post? One of my members' posts is on a jungle cliff and in an extremely awkward area he can't edit on his own.