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.
@dutchrastacraft
Nope, I guess I should put one up. I'm procrastinating that and updating the pop density repo too.
Any spigot page yet? :)
4.3.1 Updates
@bigscary
You mean timings? Yeah, no problem, just let me know :)
@moisesortiz
Show an example picture?
@SPellegrom
Yep, I'm familiar with the root problem there. Performance is on my todo list, but it's pretty low priority - I do plan to fix that, just not right now.
When I do get around to it, it would be tremendously helpful if you could assist by giving me reports like that one on a regular basis (don't do it now, I don't have time to work through them currently), since my test server isn't busy enough to get good numbers. If you're in, let me know and I'll make a note for later.
@NoChanceSD
Expect a fix today - my latest local build doesn't have that problem (and I saw the same issue with my spigot server yesterday).
@cillic1052
Today.
@Duffa13
You have to expand your borders. It means that there aren't enough resources for new players within your borders, so pop density had to go outside the borders.
@BSidiocy
Nope, continue your quest.
Does this plugin gives players something like REGION.. after you set it up?
Im making a quest server .. and I want my players to have 1 home or regions they can build to.
Is this the plugin i am looking for?
Regions are being created outside my world border and then players are unable to go to their homeregions. Any way to fix this?
Is there an ETA when this will be updated to 1.8 ?
@dutchrastacraft
Yep, i can confirm that, it shows huge resource scores for regions.
Plugin broke with Spigot 1.8. It keeps scanning for regions which causes serious lagg issues.
I dont get this, my players buildings sometimes gets erased
Regarding the "Could not pass event BlockDamageEvent to PopulationDensity v4.3". Got it today while trying to break a sign that's in another world.
Edit: Another thing that's coming back every time in my timings is the onPlayerQuit from PopulationDensity with >100% Pct Tick. Do you happen to know why it's showing up this way in the timings? http://timings.aikar.co/?url=9179645 I've checked the old (?) PD code on Github to find out what's happening but can't find a reason for it.
Thanks :)
@adamk523
You want an option to turn it off? I don't understand. Is having the command available somehow a bad thing from your standpoint?
Will /randomregion be toggleable in config or have a permission node, just in case?
Thanks for the feedback guys, I'll be sure to get /randomregion back in for the next version. :)
Thank you so much for the update, my members (especially the one with the awkward post) send their thanks as well!
Same here, users are begging for randomregion to come back :)
@bigscary
It's actually my most used command for players trying to find a good place to build. The first command that players have to type to start playing is "/randomregion". They join the server and see a sign to type /randomregion. I honestly think that this feature is the most important of all of them!
4.3 Updates
@dutchrastacraft
Good call on the docs, that would make it easier.
I can put it back in and just not doc it. Gimme a version or two. This is a lot of plugin for just /randomregion, I'm curious about how you had it set up and how you were using it?
Maybe add this to the configuration page since you added /tpa etc.
For the people that use Essentials and want to keep using it: This is the commands.yml setup.
Edit: WOW wait what!? I'm immediately downgrading right now lol, this was one of the only commands I had this plugin for!