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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

Upgrade note: If you are upgrading from PopulationDensity v5.10 or earlier, Your config will need to be changed (particularly the change from using item ids to names in the post materials section). I recommend making a copy, deleting the old one, and let PopulationDensity generate a new one. Then make changes to the new one as necessary.

Looking for a 1.12.2 or earlier-compatible version? Check here.
Got a question, suggestion, or problem? Post it on the issue tracker.



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!

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.

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 whatever command alias 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.

If you have a "my server is always full" problem, then congratulations on your successful server!
With PopulationDensity, there several tools available to help manage players:

• You may optionally boot players who are idling so more players can log in and have fun, increasing your feel-good factor (or increasing revenue for some).
  
  
• When the server IS full, a login queue guarantees fairness
  
  
• Administrative slots are set aside to guarantee administrators can always get in.
  
  
• 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.

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 do or don't matter in the grand scheme of things.


Servers using this plugin:
You can experience this plugin for yourself (as a player) by joining one of these public servers.

Additional Info
Configuration and Setup

Got a question, suggestion, or problem? Post it on the issue tracker.