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.
@technowix
Still on the list.
@bigscary
Yay <3
Localization ? =w= Region-names change ? (Store region in a "uuid-like" thing, and let admin custom the name)
4.8 Updates
@technowix
Yeah, players were upset that their last pink sheep disappeared, for example. Some colors are rare (because some dyes are rare).
@bigscary
Eeeewh... don't understand xD you try to keep a "color diversity" that it ?
4.7.1 Updates
Is Population Density ready for name changes coming on February 4?
@bigscary
Translate èwé and change the region name list :)
@technowix
Change the sign in what way?
@bigscary
Nice little update.... CAN WE CHANGE THESE SIGN ? xD
4.7 Updates
@norsemines
There are already five blocks under your spawn point - four are part of the post, plus a fifth for the block the post is sitting on. I'm aware of this problem, but haven't figured out what causes it yet.
Please make it so that when generating a post, the 5 blocks below the cobble is also filled with e.g (any solid type of block depening on the biome) , or simply cobble, and protected. This would most likely fix people joining, just to fall into the void at first time joining.
Please see this: http://bukkit.org/threads/info-newlyspawnedplayer-fell-out-of-the-world.134456/
I have not had this problem, until new players got assigned to a region with a (region)post with 1 block of water below the 3*3 XZ cobble. This does not apply where there is more than 1 block of water below the region post, AFIK. And i cant think of anything else that might cause it, since nothing else is in control of new player spawnging (that i can think of).
Norsemines workaround so far: lower the minimum post Y in plugin config, restart server, remove/naturerestore the post area, then addregionpost at the troubled area.
@bigscary
Fantastic <3 !
Waiting for localisation =w= ! I can make some vid's for french dudes if you want :D
4.6 Updates
Here's how it works.
If your server dips to 19 of possible 20 ticks per second or lower, PD considers that "lag" and immediately disables spawning in monster grinders and starts booting idle players regardless of how many player slots are available. If these measures don't solve the problem in a few minutes OR the problem gets much worse, PD searches out clusters of monsters, animals, and starts slowly removing them. When the lag problem is fixed, PD stops removing entities, turns grinders back on, and lets players idle (assuming slots are available).
Because players love their animals and hate to see them vanish, PD removes them very conservatively:
@technowix
Nope, super fast - besides if it were slow but pushed the overall performance of your server up, that's would be a win anyway.
@bigscary
Really good ideas ! If all of these fancyness is done "async" of the server :'D all of these calculation are a bit huge for a server nope ?
Just a quick update - I've been actively working on the lag fixer feature this week. My initial attempt didn't get me the results I wanted, so I'm doing some more research into the causes of lag and will consider solutions for what I discover. :)
What I can tell you to expect so far:
PD will measure lag continuously, and once per minute it will decide which, if any, lag reduction strategies should be applied. First, it will start booting idle players when the server is lagging even when there are open player slots. This allows chunks to be unloaded to save lots of CPU time and some RAM, without negatively impacting active players. Second, it will stop monsters from spawning in most monster grinders for as long as lag persists.
And third, if the other measures don't fix the lag problem, PD will actively search out large clusters of entities (monsters, animals, items, exp orbs, etc) and remove a portion. Because they represent a major investment, villagers, tamed animals, and any entities with custom name tags will never be removed. And animals will never be reduced to the extent that there aren't enough left to breed more (and when they're removed, their normal item drops will appear for possible collection).
I would love to hear your feedback on these ideas, if you have any to share. :)
@bigscary
That's exactly what it was, thanks!
@bigscary
Okay, thank you. I will just put my spawn and other public areas on a separate map.
@disciple218
How much ram do you give that server? If it doesn't have enough to load a 400x400 block area, then PD won't be able to scan for resources. That's not asking a lot - I think probably you haven't given your server the recommended minimum RAM.
@Master_W99
No, it will place region posts every 400 blocks no matter what is there. I understand your concern about the spawn and wish I could design a better solution there, but for player land claims - imaging trying to find a 400x400 area without a land claim. By the time PD finds one, it might have skipped over many resource-rich areas and that would be wasteful.
About world border, there must not be enough resources within the border. Remember PD doesn't count resources that players would have to tunnel through solid rock to get. If you can't walk from the surface to the resource and get it without breaking blocks out of the way first, PD ignores it. You could try twiddling the config settings to reduce the amount of resources PD wants to find before setting on a region.