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.
Is there some way that I can disable Population Density's /home, /tp, and /tpa commands? I'd like those to be handled by Essentials. I'm also fine with Population Density mapping them to a different name, ie. /pdhome /pdtpa, and /pdtp.
You mentioned you might add some config to disable the monster grinder/kick idle players. I'd like to disable the entire TPS monitoring element. Is this something you are still working on?
Also, here is a current and frequent sample of a timings report... any idea how I can fix these numbers regarding population density (3000% ticks on the two tasks):
PopulationDensity v4.9.3
Added feature requests to my todo list:
@justin393
PD search for spawn points spirals out from x0:z0 to minimize world data expansion. If players are being placed outside your world border, that means there are no suitable locations left inside your world border, so you should expand it.
Can you make this compatible with WorldBorder so players don't spawn outside?
The new /listregions command lists way too many regions to be useful, and we like to encourage exploration to find interesting regions or for players to be able to choose to share their region name. Could we get a way to disable this command?
@The_PC_Tech_Guy
I've tested it and your right. You can only fit up to 13 'M' characters on one line with the MLG pack. But without one (or with faithful 32x) you can fit 15 'M' characters on one line. I thought maybe this was only the case for smaller characters but it seems I'm dead wrong on that one.
I vote for the config option.
@AdvanceGamingNextLvl
Now you know. The Comic Sans font in the MLG pack apparently made some of my sign text cut off. I agree that a configurable option would be a good option - or a warning if it's over 10 characters.
@The_PC_Tech_Guy
Really? I was not aware of this. I mean, I am aware that the limit is based on the size of the characters, but not that resource packs could change the size of the characters them self. Could you send me a link to a resource pack that causes the character limit to be lessened? (Part of me can't believe this to be the case.)
Still, I am wanting an increased to the character limit, even if it's just by a few. Maybe something like 12 or 14 would be safer? or just have it be configurable? (That I would like best)
@AdvanceGamingNextLvl
Character-line limit is dependent on font style. Those using a resource pack that has different font might not see all the words
With people on my server constantly requesting me to name regions for them I’ve been looking into ways to monetize it. I’ve figured out a system, but after looking into Population Density’s code I’ve found that the one most important method I need to call (nameRegion(coords, name)) is protected. Now I understand why it’s protected. But perhaps the method could be modified to check the given string (name), much like the /nameregion command does, and if somethings wrong it could throw an exception? That should make the method safe, and therefor could have it’s visibly changed to public.
Also one thing that kind of frustrates me is the fact that we cannot choose which characters we want to be uppercase and lowercase when naming regions. As well as the 10 character limit.
It would be nice if these limits could be lifted. I’ve tested how many wide characters would fit on one line of a sign and the answer is 15. So region names could be limited up to that amount without issue.
@bigscary
I removed the entire contents of PopulationDensityData directory, but not <world>/playerdata - I assume that is what you're referring to. I'll give that a try.
EDIT. Ok deleting the main server playerdata fixed it. Thanks.
@TheLecturer
Did you start entirely over, meaning all your server's player data was removed before you started back up again? PD's rule is to only send players to the new player area if they've never been on the server before. If you happen to have any data held over from your last map, that would be problematic for those players.
Please share your logs, showing a new player logging in and getting assigned to a region that isn't your new player area?
Trying the latest version (4.9.3) on a new map. Only one region open so far (as expected), which is "0 0" and contains "redstone". However any new players joining are being assigned to a different region, wilderness (in fact in the middle of an ocean) - here's the contents of a file from PlayerData - 1 -2 Thursday, May 14, 2015 4:33:28 PM BST 100
Here's the config.yml http://pastebin.com/3RNUWjxm
Thanks.
That's what I meant by command aliases (commands.yml) but this doesn't block /pluginname:command
4.9.3 Updates
@The_PC_Tech_Guy
You will get posts in the ocean by design. The rule is one post every 400 blocks without exception. However, no new players would be automatically assigned to start playing at that post, since there are no resources around for them to use.
The post names are customizable with /nameregion, but right now the default names list is not customizable (it's on my todo list). You can already change the way they look (materials, not shape), and customize some of the signs on them.
To block off the command, you could also use your commands.yml (it's a craftbukkit config file) to avoid involving another plugin. I'll check on the max distance thing.
@TheLecturer
I think the spigot team may have broken something (again). I got the big ugly log error you shared via pastebin after I updated my server to the latest 1.8.3, but then after recompiling PopDensity (without any code changes!), it vanished. Maybe just using the new version I just uploaded will fix the issue for you.
Since they took on the project after the 1.8 release, the Spigot team has broken my plugins 4 times. It used to be the case (when the original craftbukkit team was running the project) that breaking changes from them would only come with major version updates, like 1.7.10 to 1.8 for example, but the spigot team is a little sloppy by comparison. :\
@bigscary
Decided to take a quick look around on one of my older worlds for about a minute with a map viewer (a test map where I also tested out PopulationDensity a while ago), and found a region post that populationdensity built... in the middle of an ocean. http://www.minecraftworldmap.com/worlds/BW2fA/full#/194/64/-204/-2/0/0
I hope that region posts (like the names and all) will be more configurable if I later decide to use region posts...
@bigscary
Thanks for your reply. I'm actaully going to take back my earlier comments, as we've had additional episodes of the intense lag since my previous posts, and PopulationDensity is not currently loaded.
@bigscary
Still provides about a radius of 5 to use the /homeregion and related commands. Pretty much a non-issue since it's only teleporting to one invisible post within a 5 block radius, but I'll try to block it off with command aliases (and unless you know of any others, boosCoolDowns automatically blocks the /pluginname:command syntax)
Changing this value to -1 fully disables region post protection. 0 protects the one block (similar to vanilla spawn-protection).
@TheLecturer
I don't know what gave you the impression that the project is inactive - I've been working on it actively for months. I will track down this issue and fix it for you - will you please share a pastebin of your config.yml, in case your settings are relevant to the investigation?
Also for what it's worth I don't think running on a map which started in 1.710 is the cause, as my test server also started in 1.7.10. Maybe something to do with your border settings, though...?
@samuelsgaarden
I'll add a config option to disable that.
@The_PC_Tech_Guy
Yes, I think so. Please tell me if you encounter any oddities. I'm unsure whether anyone has turned off that much of the functionality before. There may be some bugs for me to work out in that case. :)
Hi, So I want to use everything except the region posts and teleportation/spawning. Would these config options effectively disable these?