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
And for change "post" sign ? This is yhe only things have haved to edit the jar directly xD
When are the new features gonna be available to download ???
@technowix
Yep localizability and colored messages are on my todo list. As for changing commands, you can do that in your commands.yml file (see craftbukkit wiki).
@bigscary
Looking great ! Are you planning to support localization ? And change to the command ? I'm french and lot of these are not pretty intuitive for french player :p
Hey all, I've got some rather bold changes coming, and most of them are now on the test server (see link above). Come check it out, then leave a comment to tell me whether you like the changes or not. :) You can also read about some of the chagnes on the test server's facebook page, http://bit.ly/beardcraftfb.
@cillic1052
I'm removing it from the plugin entirely, so stay tuned.
@eternity_devined
I can't prevent bad mods from circumventing Bukkit plugin rules. If the mods are well made, protections put in place by Bukkit plugins (like PD's region post protection) will work. If they're not well made, your options are to either disable the problematic parts of the mod or uninstall it completely.
I have put the rebuilding of posts back in, so if they are broken by some bad code in a mod, they will come back after a while.
@eternity_devined
If your ftb run on a cauldron server, you will not get more issue than average bukkit server :P ! Also considere bukkit can't handle the destruction of something do be a bad crafted forge mod ! :/ (like balkon weapon mod, or industrialcraft nuke)
How do I turn off ./randomregion ??
@bigscary
Please do not forget FTB....
@bigscary
Yay ! :D Want to hug everybody ! xD this been a lot of time i didn't started a server o/ Good luck with that ! And if you need French translation, i'm here ! ;)
Good news, admins have restored my "author" level privileges. I will start releasing updated versions soon.
@TheLecturer
That's actually a bug I'm working to fix right now.
@bigscary @jkcclemens
Ewh, he giveup x: , i think. Anyway, thank for being re-interested in a bukkit version :D ! That could be cool if you do something ! I want to start a little survival server, but i don't want to get bored player with a boring map and a ugly landscape, your plgin was the messy, but he are not here for now x)
Is there a best-practice for setting up the spawn location of a server with Population Density?
On my current server, the spawn building is near the centre of the map, which is typically going to also be the first open region. When the map first went live, all the new joiners couldn't escape the spawn building because when they typed "/homeregion" (as instructed) they were told "You are already in your home region".
It's not a problem now, as that region closed long ago, but I'm about to open another server (I have a BungeeCord system) and would like to avoid this situation.
I have thought that I could set the spawn building thousands of blocks away from the centre of the map, perhaps in the middle of an ocean. This should work, but *eventually* PD will open up the region that the spawn building is located in, and those new joiners will experience the same problem.
There's probably something I'm not understanding about how it should be setup - any advice appreciated.
@technowix
Would definitely like to do that. Haven't been able to contact jkcclemens to get permission to post new versions of PD here - he seems to have gone radio silence on me. :\
@bigscary @Okane84
Agree, i would love it too :')
@bigscary
@jkcclemens
don't you ever update this for craftbukkit/spigot ? i really find this plugin useful, but lacks of permissions for all commands... please think about going on developing also here on bukkit.
For anyone wondering about the status of this project, I do plan to port this plugin over to Sponge once that platform is stable. See spongepowered.org.
@jkcclemens
Thanks for adding me back. :)
@tacirus
It doesn't exist in game, but you can look at your files - each region has a file where the filename is the name of the region.
First off! Love the plugin! I use it religiously, so THANK YOU jkcclemens!
I have a possible bug! When editing sign text in the config, the new signs are now placed on the lowest block on the region post. VERY annoying and seems weird! Im running Spigot 1.7.10!
Thanks for the plugin! And thanks in advance for the help!
How do I get the list of all regions in a world? Does any command exist?
@Typical_Name
Yes, there's an option to not build posts in the config file.