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The adventures of Rusa in Toontown (the fourteenth instalment)

Tired of getting ToonHQ notifs for Cog invasions, but not for groups? Tire no more!

ToonHQ already natively features notifications for Cog invasions, but hasn’t even the slightest analogous function for its groups. So I made an mfing userscript to restore my sanity.

Did I make it specifically for my own purpose & is it probably slightly janky & does it rely on internal details of ToonHQ’s UI? Yes. But it’s written in what I might call “reasonably tidy” TypeScript code, & it works. Sanity (or rather, what iota of it I might have left) restored. 😌

How do I run it?

You need a userscript manager. I use Firemonkey, but you can use something else like e.g. Violentmonkey instead.

With your userscript manager, install the script found at https://codeberg.org/deer/toonhq_group_notifs/raw/branch/master/main.js. Then navigate to https://toonhq.org/groups/. You should get a UI that’s a bit like this:

For more details, check out the README that I wrote for it! Wow~! ✨

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Lightly contented

I’ve mentioned previously that Rusa is a little stuck in between having already obtained her CBHQ suit, & not yet beginning the ToonTaskline to obtain the LBHQ one (& therefore not having the BBHQ one, either). It is a little awkward, but I enjoy SBHQ & CBHQ anyway, so.

I’ve been chipping away at my CBHQ suit promos, doing the occasional Cog building here or there, maybe a Coin if I feel like it or if someone invites me. You know. We’re chilling large.

But then… it happened.

Well, okay. I admit that it’s not really a big deal. Even if I choose to chip away at the Cogbucks, 1.3k of them isn’t really that many.

Nonetheless, the 1.3k-Cogbuck promo is the first promo that actually suggests to the player that they should maybe knock out the whole promo with just a single(!) Bullion run. I certainly haven’t set hoof in a Bullion since UNM, doe…

Taking the Bullion by the horns

But I hadn’t much time for pussyfooting before I got a direct invitation from my friend Madz. I accepted, & continued gardening because I saw that our group had just three Toons in total (the other being Scooter)…

Then, it turned out that we were just gonna trio it anyway:

Trioing seems a little risky for a big tough facility that I’ve never so much as attempted previously, but all right.

Honestly? The Cogs are not even that high-level. Pfft.

The Bullion version of the big JQ room is a li’l diff, though:

Now there are two giant gears in the middle? And they’re spinning really fastly?? Howsoever will I make it through???

Okay, I did it. What’s next?

Oh no… My worst nightmare… Cute little goons in the interstices betwixt the stompers?!? Surely shall I perish.

Unfortunately, however, it was about to get really real — for realsie reals. We encountered A Big Lag™ (the most dastardly villain of them all), & by the time we came out the other side, Madz was gone. Pooft.

If you’re not already experienced in the ways of Tewtow yourself, then it may be difficult to impress upon you just how much battle dynamics can change with the number of Toons involved. Given that we’d normally have four Toons in a facility (e.g. Bullion Mint) run — & indeed, cannot possibly have more than four — a duo might seem like it’s at half power. Half of four is two, right?

But Tewtow being the strategy game that it is, losing just one Toon can easily be a dramatic change: not only do you have that much less “firepower”, so to speak, but so many of the strategies that you had at your disposal are just… not possible anymore. There’s only so much that you can do in one turn!

Still, Scooter seemed fairly unperturbed. So I figured, what the heck. He seems like he knows what he’s doing.

And so we arrived at The Mint Auditor:

An array of two level 12s & a level 11 might not look so tough, but you have to remember: they all have jacked-up HPs & a Mint Auditor at their side. Not only is the Auditor a big ol’ sack of HPs all on his own, but he can probably promote & unlure the Cogs, too. Along with various other such tomfooleries…

Our first move was simple: let’s just get rid of one of them. The Robber Baron is the lowest in level, so I tost a fatty TNT at it:

We start, just like in the Coin Mint, in a Bear Market. This means that we get useful Defence Up that basically reduces all incoming damage by a constant factor, but also means that we have Gag Tax, making each gag usage consume two gags instead of one.

Although the defence helps us stay alive even when we have to take upwards of three hits within a single round, we are not tryna turn this into a war of attrition. That would surely devolve into spamming SOSes because we’d have no real gags left.

Trap gags are, realistically — especially considering our scanty party of just two Toons — going to be the most difficult to use. So instantly burning up two (due to Gag Tax) TNTs in the first round of battle isn’t a huge deal.

Scooter also decided on a $10 Bill for Lure purposes, because Big Magnet seems unnecessarily inaccurate, & instantly burning two(!) Hypno-goggles is probably not the right idea either. After all, we still have Defence Up on our side anyway, & at absolute best, we really lure one, maybe two, of the Cogs: the Auditor (like all supervisors, presumably) always unlures instantly — only staying lured just long enough to take damage from a Trap (or Squirt, or what have you) — in addition to one Cog being unlured by TNT, & presumably another one manually unlured (for multiple rounds…) by the Auditor.

But the eagle-eyed amongst you will notice that the TNT’d level 11 Baron in the above image still has an orange light on its chest. Remember how I said they have jacked-up HPs? Yeahh…

Our only hope of Gag Tax evasion is getting rid of that damned Baron, but that’s easier said than done… And the friccing NoCo^[1] on the left has already been promoted by four levels to level 16! What do heck‽

Thankfully, although we had some “meh” luck along the way, we did get rid of the Baron, & workt our way towards victory. Seeing that NoCo repeatedly get promoted, however… it was brutal:

Level 18? Excuse me, but… what? I mean… huh‽ Since when did Cog levels even go that fuqqing high??? Do I even want to know how much HP that is…?

$$\left(18+1\right)\left(18+2\right)+14=394\text{;}$$

Plus another +200⁢ HP for being a Cog in the final fight of a Bullion = 594 ≈ 600!! And now I am curst wif dis knowledge… 😔

Needless to say, whittling away at a beefy ≈600⁢ HP or so, all the while being positively bullied into nigh-uselessness by the Auditor, is a… difficult process. But we heccing did it:

Transcription of the chatbubbles in the above image

Scooter: EAT IT

Rusa [SpeedChat]: You’re outta here!

😤

And with that, it was time to finally make the big bad Auditor himself go boom:

Transcription of the chatbubbles in the above image

The Mint Auditor: I’ll write this off as a loss.

Rusa [SpeedChat]: See ya later, alligator.

Scooter: LETS GO

😤😤😤

I must say, it was undoubtedly a bizarre sort of first experience to have with a piece of game content. But I wouldn’t trade it for any other one.

In the end, we’d used something like ≈2 (IIRC; maybe more) SOSes — a lot for a single facility run, to be sure, but perhaps not so much considering our circumstances. Although duoing the Bullion Auditor was a first for both of us, Scooter remained very calm throughout, & it was clear to me that he nonetheless knew what he was doing — & even welcomed the challenge.

The same became even more evident to me later, when the three of us (Madz having relog’d) did a more normal Coin Mint run with a single random from ToonHQ: during the Auditor battle, Scooter had a unique approach that confused our poor random to the point of outward frustration; but when we all followed through according to his plan anyway, it workt like a charm!

Thus, although this story of my first post-UNM Bullion^[2] might sound superficially like a horror story, I’m actually quite grateful to’ve had it. Not only did it give me more perspective on the Auditor fight, but it was a pleasure to take on a Toontown battle — & one of some significant challenge, at that — with someone who has a careful & interested perspective, rather than a perspective of “just do the thing so that I can move on to the next”.

Footnotes for “Taking the Bullion by the horns”

1. [↑] See the “It’s crunch time” section of the sixth instalment, for the etymology of NoCo.
2. [↑] Don’t you worry; I did plenty — I mean puh-lentyy — of Bullions back before UNM was so much as conceived of.

−4

The item could not
be purchased because of some
internal game fault.

Green-hooved

It is a battle of wait, not of weight.

Nevertheless, there are a few maxlaffs to be had, so I’ve continued in my gardening journey of logging in once daily to tend to my garden: pick ten flowers, plant ten flowers, water ten flowers, & sell ten flowers to the wheelbarrow in my backyard.

Everyone has a wheelbarrow in their backyard that has a seemingly infinite source of jellybeans in exchange for flowers, right? It’s normal.

And at long last, I have achieved the highest jelly of all jellyshovels: eight-bean.

…Platoonias, Istilla Roses, Threelips…

But these eight-bean flowers won’t be around for long. I’ve only to feed five or so to my hungry, hungry wheelbarrow before I’ve transcended (superseeded, if you will…) gardening altogether:

And with that, I now have all four maxlaff that can be obtained from gardening. It’s not exactly the most difficult, nor even most tedious, activity to collect all the maxlaff of (I should dread to ever max racing…), but it’s still a considerable achievement & a noticeable bump in maxlaff. Huzzah.

Oh, & I get a kinda cute ’fit out of it:

Donald’s Dreamcube

And finally, I attended yet another out-of-bounds (OOB) beanfest at the DDL playground — but this time, not in “the grey”:

This little region, whilst perfectly well on the DDL bed itself, is nonetheless OOB insofar as it’s inside one of the ordinarily-impenetrable toy blocks.

Why should anyone care? What’s in a virtual toy block? Well, in addition to my previous musings on the inescapable allure & cosiness of DDL, there’s something else in store for DDL’s playground in the near future… Stay tooned!!