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The adventures of Rusa in Toontown (the sixteenth instalment)

Testing, testing, 1, 2, 3…

TTR put out a call for help testing their brand spankin’ new “Quest2” ToonTask system. Curious to see what was new, & enticed by the promise of exclusive cosmetic rewards, I installed the TTR Test Launcher & logged onto Rusa.

I had never played on the test server before, but from what I can tell, every so often, its database contents are (at least partially) overwritten with those of the main server. Thus, logging onto the test server is a lot like logging onto a slightly older version of your Toons. Some of your progress on the test server is saved (but not observable from the main server, of course), & then periodically partially overwritten.

In any case, my first stop was the Toon HQ!:

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• (Just for fun!) Catch: 3 Holey Mackerels, Anywhere. Reward: Small legs

Wow! We have fishing Tasks now!! Or, will have them. Three Holey Mackerels sounds pretty tough, though.

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• (Just for fun!) Defeat: 50 Cog Buildings, Anywhere. Reward: 1500 jellybeans

This Task is pretty neato! 1.5k beans ain’t half bad, & although 50 Cog Buildings is a lot, there’s no stipulation about how many storeys they have to be, where they have to be, what department they have to be, &c.. So this is a neat way to encourage players to do some classic Cog-Building content, & help out those who were already gonna be doing that content anyway!

But I think my favourite new Task that I saw on the test server was this one:

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• (Just for fun!) Apprentice: Help a Toon 50 Laff Or Less Defeat: 50 Cogs, Sellbot HQ. Reward: 1300 jellybeans

This Task covers basically two classes of Toons: those working through the Daisy Gardens Taskline (e.g. the 80-jellybean pouch Task), & Übers! That means that you can earn beans just by doing Über content with Übers! Cool!!

I ended up testing a fishing Task:

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• (Just for fun!) Catch: 12 Old Boots by: Fishing, Anywhere. 1 of 12 caught. Reward: 1200 jellybeans

I like the idea of fishing & getting rewarded for the old boot duds, even when it’s not Fish Bingo time!

After some quality fishing time alone, I was rewarded for my testing!:

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Thank you for participating in the ToonTask beta test!

You can now redeem the code foiled-again on the live game as a reward for being a dedicated tester!

I didn’t find any bugs (yet!), but ≈30⁢ minutes of testing is all it takes. Let’s checc out the cosmetics I got…?:

Wow. Beautiful. I’ll be wearing these frequently, I’m sure…

Báimiàn’s turn

But what about Báimiàn Húli?? Surely she also needs some stylish tinfoil hats…

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Districts

Total Toontown Population: 1

---

• Devhaven
• Framebuffer Falls
• Shader Point [SpeedChat-only]
• Sillycon Valley
• Welcome Valley

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Sillycon Valley

Population: 1

This district is safe from Mega-Invasions, Cog Invasions, and Invasion Summons.

Teleport Here!

Oh my! The testing has been going on for quite a few days now, so almost everyone who wanted their tin foils already got them. That makes me the only Toon in the entire server!!

But I won’t let that put me off. I’m determined to find a bug! And find I did.

Basically, I found that Bái was (on both the live server & on Quest2) in a degenerate state whereby all NPCs (in every Toon HQ, every Toon Building, &c.) offered only one (1) type of “Just for Fun!” reward to her. This is in contrast to the (at least) 13 types of “Just for Fun!” reward that should be available to her.

The full bug report that I sent in

Which ToonTask has a bug?

All “Just for Fun!” (henceforth “JFF”) ToonTasks, in any playground’s Toon Headquarters, on any street’s Toon Headquarters, or in any Toon Building.

What is the bug?

The ToonTasks offered are notionally “random”, but are not actually random at all in practice.

I visited every HQ Officer in every Toon Headquarters of every playground, as well as every HQ Officer in the Toon Headquarters of two streets (viz. Sleet Street and Tenor Terrace), as well as the shopkeepers of three Toon Buildings (viz. Flower Bed and Breakfast, April’s Showers and Tubs, and Dirt. Cheap.), and found that every single JFF Task offered had exactly the same reward: “Small head”. You can find a CSV of the raw data that I collected on 2024-11-02 at the URL below (it includes other things besides just the rewards):

https://codeberg.org/deer/gists/src/branch/master/baimian_test_server_tasks.csv

To give a little more context, this test was performed on in-game name “Báimiàn Húli”, TTID-FDNJ-NNBB. I had the following ToonTasks in progress at the time that the test was performed:

1. Deliver a Clothing Ticket to Bonnie Blossom, at the Clothing Shop in the Playground of Daisy Gardens. Reward: Clothing Ticket.
2. Recover a Sprocket from Glad Handers, Anywhere. Reward: 2 point Laff boost.

Although this is clearly a “bug” in my sense, I thought that I could work around it by completing (1.), by delivering the Clothing Ticket. However, this only seems to make things worse: now instead of random-ish JFF Tasks awarding only Small head, I get the exact same JFF Task (viz. 25 Cogs, in Daisy Gardens) awarding only Clothing Ticket.

To my knowledge, at least 13 types of JFF rewards should be available to me; namely, 11 distinct cheesy effects, jellybeans, and Clothing Ticket. This bug reduces that to just 1 — that is, roughly 7.7%. Although this isn’t a glaringly obviously broken bug in the way that a client crash is, I don’t think that it’s unreasonable to expect that some players will want to do JFF Tasks, even if they also happen to have non-JFF Tasks as well. Thus, making at the very least the rewards — if not also the objectives — genuinely random, with some kind of reasonably-uniform distribution in some sense, should be expected of a not-buggy implementation of the ToonTask system.

How did you find this bug?

Some form of this bug also exists on the main server, but Quest2 has either not fixed it, or else has made it yet worse. Thus, I knew exactly what to look for.

✨⁠Bonus Screenshot⁠✨!:

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HQ Officer: Deliver a Clothing Ticket to Bonnie Blossom

Bái on the streets (feat. Harley)

But that’s enough testing for one update. It’s time to Tewtow for realsies.

Bái’s gags are finally complete! I had already previously maxed Toon-Up, Throw, & Drop, but now all my Drop gags are organic (meaning org Toontanic)!:

Plus, I went with Harley to TTC to finish up our Cog Galleries!:

Very nice. You can tell from my radar that this is a TTC street!

And basically, we did Cog Buildings. Like, a lot of buildings. If we’re gonna be V.P.ing, then Harley needs to get those gag tracks on up!

In our buildingventures, I ran into two types of people interested in my IGN:

• People who read my name just fine, & were intrigued to find someone with an MSM name on this game. Well, I was likewise pleasantly surprised to encounter people who could read it!
• People who had no idea what language (if any) my name could possibly be in, but were curious to find out what it meant.

Unless probed further, I generally did not go into the details of things like Journey to the West, MSM, Hànyǔ Pīnyīn, &c., but instead just explained that my name meant “white-faced fox”.

Many people — regardless of whether or not they could read my name — were also surprised to learn that it was even a valid Toon name at all. As explained previously, TTR basically (as far as I know) allows for any alphabetic characters in Windows-1252 to be used in Toon names, which allows for a large minority (give or take) of Hànyǔ Pīnyīn words to be encoded.

Occasionally, someone will hazard a guess as to what language my name’s in. I recall one person in one of my buildings who asked if it was in an “Indian language”, but the way he worded it gave me the distinct idea that he really meant something more like an indigenous language of the Americas. Although I certainly understand that people who have no point of reference have nothing other than wild guesses to make, this particular innocent question was confused at multiple levels:

• At first blush, an “Indian language” would surely be nothing other than one of the languages of India, which are not generally related to one another; that is, they represent multiple primary (read: top-level) language families, especially Indo-European & Dravidian (amongst others).
• Confusingly, however, aboriginal (a.k.a. indigenous) peoples of the New World are sometimes known as “Indians”, dating back to a centuries-old error in which the Antilles were confused for Southeast Asia.
• Similarly to the phrase “Indian language”, the phrase “indigenous language of the Americas” doesn’t narrow it down much either. In fact, the situation is worse, as the Americas represent a dizzying array of unrelated (or apparently unrelated) languages — including both families & isolates — spoken across multiple continents & subcontinents.
• And the actual fact of the matter, of course, is that this is just about as far off as one could get! The Mandarinic languages are native to East Asia, & are unrelated to all indigenous languages of the Americas, being instead Sino-Tibetan.

In many — if not most — parts of the Americas, however, the indigenous languages of the region are not widely or dominantly spoken, leading to the mistaken impression that these “other” languages form a stock of their own — or perhaps even a single language with many “dialects”. In reality, the “New World” immediately prior to European colonisation was easily as linguistically & ethnically diverse as its “Old” counterpart.

But that’s enough philology or whateverthefuc for now, I think… Let’s level up those gags??

Wowie! Harley’s first level 6 gag! The most common first level 6 gag is Birthday Cake, but in this house, we’re all about that Squirt.

For Bái’s final “Just for Fun!” ToonTask (at least until Quest2 or Quest3 or whatever…), I ended up with small legs for four days or so:

Looks like the Juggling Cubes’ sizes scale with your leg size!

Anyway, what makes Cog Building content really great is not just that you get some classic TTO combat vibes, but also that it’s pretty chill a lot of the time, so you get to goof off in chat.

Really, Cog Buildings are significantly less fun if you don’t have a talkative party. When I was grinding all those buildings on Rusa by joining lots of random ToonHQ groups, I sometimes resorted to multitasking (reading blog posts on the side…) when in taciturn parties.

We met a black cat named Kitty Of Samhain^[1] who had been trying desperately to train her drop, but had lost some faith as a result of frequent misses. Drop does have notoriously poor accuracy, so this is a common outcome for newbie Drop users.

I took the opportunity to educate her in the ways of Cog-taunting; typically:

1. Pick a Drop gag.
2. Just before your Toon begins to use the gag, use the “Catch!” SpeedChat phrase.
3. If the gag hits, use the “Good boy!” (or “Good girl!”)^[2] SpeedChat phrase.

Kitty Of Samhain quickly learnt how effective this was:

Her drop gags were hitting every single time!!

Of course, the real reason why her Drops were hitting every time was because I was Dropping with her (that is, targeting the same Cog). This causes my trackExp value (which is maxed, naturally) to be used instead of hers. Oh, & stunning helps too, of course! But I didn’t have the heart to tell her……

Now, you might think that Cog Buildings really are too easy. Well, thincc again. I’ve only 34 maxlaff, so a lot of things are scary for me! Including Shark Week™…:

Oh, dear. And on the first round of the first floor, no less…

Water the odds?

I’m not gonna lie: I thought I was fine here, & then I freakin’ instantly dyed. I thought that that must’ve been quite unlikely, & so I decided to find out for real.

We were confronted with two fresh Loan Sharks, of levels 11 & 10, respectively. Both Harley & Lauzilla picked Big Magnet (& we were a party of three), so I decided to pass. Simple, right?

You might question my choice. However, being both Lureless & Trapless, I have no way in which to increase the probability of Lure hitting. Thus, the only way to defend myself is to have a backup plan for the case in which Lure misses. But my only way of one-shotting an unlured level 10 or 11 Cog is with either a Grand Piano or level 7 gag. In the considerably more likely case that Lure hits, any Drop gag that I use is guaranteed to miss. I could Piano anyway, but even in the unlikely scenario that Lure misses, my Piano will still probably miss, on account of not being stunned for. Thus, eager to save my most powerful gags for later — this is the 1^st floor, mind you — I simply passed.

That Lure misses

In any case, let’s start with the simple probability that Lure misses:

$$\begin{array}{ccccc}\mathrm{atkAcc}& =\mathrm{propAcc}& +\mathrm{trackExp}& +\mathrm{tgtDef}& +\mathrm{bonus}\\ & =65& +10\cdot \left(5-1\right)& +\left(\mathrm{-50}\right)& +20\\ & =65& +40& -50& +20\\ & \multicolumn{4}{c}{=75\text{.}}\end{array}$$

This is neo-TTR (read: v4) mathematics. The strangest part is that bonus is nonzero: we get +20 from the “lure bonus” granted by using two group Lures at once (it also works for multiple single Lures at once, so long as they target the same Cog). However, although bonus just so happens to be 20 in this case, it is not a flat +20 (per additional Lure after the first) in general, as you might expect based on TTO mechanics.

In any case, I’m quite certain that we get an atkAcc of 75, meaning a 100% − 75% = ¼ probability of missing.

That I am attacked by both Loan Sharks

But let’s say Lure misses. I have 34 laff, so the Loan Sharks definitely cannot one-shot me. Therefore, for me to die, they have to at least both choose to target me. Because no damage is dealt to either Cog, there’s no aggro, & each Cog chooses its target uniformly at random:

$${\left(\frac{1}{3}\right)}^2=\frac{1}{9}\text{.}$$

That their attacks in fact kill me

But let’s say Lure misses, and both Loan Sharks choose to target me. That doesn’t necessarily mean that I die; for example, if either (or both) of their attacks miss, then I’m guaranteed to live. But to make things even more complicated, I can still live even if both attacks hit me!

Loan Sharks have four distinct attacks: Bite, Chomp, Play Hardball (bonk!), & Write Off. Because the Cogs have different levels, the order in which they choose their attacks matters: if they choose Bite followed by Chomp, that deals a different amount of total damage than Chomp followed by Bite. In this case, it actually turns out not to matter much, but basically, we end up with 4 ⋅ 4 = 16 possible attack patterns.

For each of the 16 attack patterns, we need to know:

• The probability that this attack pattern is selected.
• The probability that neither of the attacks miss.
• The total damage dealt; particularly, whether this total damage is greater than or equal to 34.

And then we have to crunch a bunch of numbers! Love that. I could’ve automated it with a script or something, but I’m gonna be honest with you: I didn’t. Yikes…

Long story short, the probability that their attacks in fact kill me — assuming a Lure miss, & that both Cogs decide to target me — is 1379⁄3200 ≈ 43.09%.

In total

The final, overall probability that this strategy results in my death is:

$$\frac{1}{4}\cdot \frac{1}{9}\cdot \frac{\mathrm{1 379}}{\mathrm{3 200}}=\frac{\mathrm{1 379}}{\mathrm{115 200}}\approx \frac{1}{84}\approx \mathrm{1.2\%}\text{.}$$

So… yeah! Pretty unluccy. 😅

Back 2 it

Alright, alright — that’s enough maffematix. For now…

Along with comments on my name, I got a similar amount of commentary on my Toon build:

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B.D. Petalsqueak: that[’s] crazy that u r 34 [maxlaff] with three level 7 [gags] LOL
super impressive
u r the coolest uber ive seen

Báimiàn Húli: <3

As a reward for our dedicated building-smashing, we earnt silver stars:

Stylish!

Ever seen a Soundless and Lureless non-Über?:

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Binx

black cat;
laff: 80 / 80

• District: Bounceboro
• Location: Lullaby Lane
• Toon ID: TTID-KTFJ-DTBB
• Pronouns: ey/its/her

[Soundless-&-Lureless 5-tracker with organic Throw; all gag tracks maxed]

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Báimiàn Húli: cute gags

Running a Cog Building with this 5-tracker was a bit of a throwback to The Good Ol’ Daze™ of TTO content (in TTO or TTR), where one salient way of making the game more challenging was to play Soundless-&-Lureless — as a Toon, or if you were fortunate, as a party. That’s not to say that these kinds of builds no longer make sense — they are, after all, just semi builds like any other — but TTR has since decided (in some cases for better, & in some for worse…) that this is not the way in which players are to be “challenged”. I do love seeing these builds around, though, & no doubt do they change the gameplay somewhat!

In other news, Harley maxed her first gag track: Squirt, of course!

Congrats!!

The server is experiencing technical issues. Please be patient…

Logging back in

It looks like that djinckst it, because we failed Mission № 1…:

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Báimiàn Húli: oh my lord

Harley: oh no

Yeahh… That might not look like a very formidable Cog lineup, but as it turns out, if I get sufficiently unlucky, a lot of things can kill me!

I’m used to it, though. I wouldn’t let it get my spirits down — not even if someone in my Cog Building party was the Scrooge of Gluemas!

Footnotes for “Bái on the streets (feat. Harley)”

1. [↑] Note that Samhain is not to be pronounced as if it were an English word. This Goidelic term is typically Anglicised as /⁠ˈsaʊ̯.wən⁠/.
2. [↑] Robots don’t have genders! Do not @ me!!

Toonyms

I’ve continued to keep my eye out for interesting Toon names — Toonyms, if you will. I found another one that actually makes good use of the non-ASCII characters — for Icelandic!:

Leigubílstjóri “taxi driver” = leigubíll “taxicab” + stjóri “boss, chief; captain, conductor”; the latter of which is cognate with English steer (as in steering wheel). Leigubíll = leiga “rent” + bíll “motorcar”; the former is a distant cognate of English lend, & the latter is equivalent to a clipping of automobile.

One diminutive of Castilian caja “box” gets us this name:

Cajeta is not an especially common word, but it has a few senses, one of which is “female genitalia”. It strikes me as somewhat unlikely that this was the sense intended by the player; but considering TTR’s attitude towards the ordinary given name Fanny, I’m surprised that this name was approved. Then again, they also approved the Toonym Snail Trail; so maybe if you want to reference female genitalia in your Toonym, you just have to be the slightest bit subtle!

Ms. Hollywood level 99999999999

Alright — no more dilly-dallying! I’m friccing maxing Rusa’s Sellbot suit!!

For my maxing, I brought along Harley for her first-ever V.P.! Wowzers!

’Twas a smooth run, although unfortunately, the game never sided us with each other for either of the Cog-fighting phases! Phooey!

Awl roight, time for me to do my frontstunning…!:

And just like that, I’m level 50! Yay for Rusa’s first sooot maxing!!:

Don’t you worry, Sofie. I will.

Bái gets down to srs Über bsns

Now, that won’t be the end of Rusa’s V.P.ing, to be sure — I’ll keep running on her, even if only to rack up SOS cards. And it definitely won’t be the end of her suit-maxing — she’s still got three more to go!!

But what about Bái? She is an Über, after all! Sellbot HQ is her whole thing!!

Well, my gags are certainly up to the task. But what about my fashion?

I won’t lie: the “Infinite” (or whatever it’s called — I can’t remember) set has some pretty ugly colours. Bright yellow & bright red… hmmm… but I can make it work. I absolutely adore the design otherwise, & I really just wish that there were more colour options!

And, naturally, I need a Hallowe’en look as well:

I think I like the Hallowe’en vibes on Bái a lot! Here’s a photo from the back, so you can see my wooden sword & the purple patch on the back of the witch hat:

Anywho, let’s get some merits:

Ouf… a Sound miss. Good thing this isn’t a Steel! Heh…

After this particular run, I was invited by the above-pictured Prof. Crazy Horse to check out his house:

I had never before seen this rather clever way of getting into The Grey™! I s’pose there was no particular reason to make the ceiling have a hitbox or whatever, so it just… doesn’t have one. You can climb right on up!

Prof. Crazy Horse’s house — especially the parts in the grey — was quite impressive indeed. After he showed me around, I decided to ask him what languages he spoke. Most TTR players are native English speakers, but I noticed some peculiarities in his typing. It turned out that he was a monolingual English speaker after all! When he mentioned that he was a retiree, I chalked up any quirks that I may or may not’ve detected to a likely difference in age.

But anyway, we’ve got those promos! We’re so ready to V.P.!!

Whilst waiting for our V.P. group to fill, I noticed someone else — unfortunately not in our group — in the lobby:

When I saw this Toonym, naturally, I was excited to open up their Toon info panel & see that they were a Toon-Up-only 1-tracker. Although I was slightly disappointed to see that they also have Throw & Squirt, I was pleasantly surprised that I had actually never witnessed such a build before: a tank “Über” with at least one non-Throw-non-Squirt track!

I encountered a more conventional (2-track, Throw-&-Squirt-only) tank “Über” in the “Mr. Quackintosh” section of the previous entry. Of course, the problem with going beyond Throw & Squirt is that, every time you have to unlock another gag track, you bring yourself yet closer to just having a normal build, rather than being a tank “Über”.

But in principle, there’s no reason why a tank “Über” can’t go at least as far as a neoclassical Über can. In fact, consider a tank “Über” with Drop or Lure (e.g. a 4-tracker with Lure, Sound, Throw, & Squirt): they can exploit the fact that the DG ToonTaskline awards maxlaff without also unlocking a gag track, thus allowing them to progress almost (that is, sans the final Task) all the way through the MML Taskline. This would put them at a base maxlaff (solely from Tasks) of a whopping 52~! Wowzers. I think that puts their final maxlaff (at level 50) at 74?? “Tank”-y indeed.

Anyway. I finally got sided with Harley during a V.P. — & I didn’t even dye~! ✨⁠Wow!⁠✨ We love it when Lure actually works:

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Báimiàn Húli [SpeedChat]: Hot Diggity Dog!

Harley: excellent

You might expect that I’m more wary of the V.P. itself when I’m playing an Über like Bái. Although that’s certainly true to at least some degree — particularly on 15-base-maxlaffers — the V.P. is really not all that scary when it plays fair.

Back In The Day™, V.P. used to be a lot… “buggier”, let’s say. In particular, it was possible to take damage from the V.P.’s jump attack (its highest-damage attack, at −10 laff a piece) with an arbitrarily small amount of time to react, thus making it straight-up humanly impossible (& maybe completely impossible, in some cases) to dodge. Nowadays, these kinds of bugs have been fixed, even if in sometimes kludgy ways. For example, it’s no longer possible to take damage from the jump attack unless the V.P. actually finishes its attack animation — that is, it actually hits the ground!

With the V.P. playing fair, it’s no longer practically possible for a competent player to die to the V.P., with the slight exception of a low-laff Toon who’s aggressively frontstunning & gets sufficiently unlucky! That could be me!! But Bái has 34 maxlaff, & the V.P.’s attacks (aside from its jump) are just not that strong, so it’s not a real issue:

I will say that I’ve found it slightly more difficult to frontstun on Bái than on Rusa. I attribute this to two factors:

• Unexpectedly, Rusa is somewhat shorter than Bái (I guess TTR thinks that dogs are bigger than deer…?), which gives her a natural advantage. In fact, if you want the largest advantage w.r.t. the V.P. fight, then you want the Small Toon cheesy effect! This is because the height from which your pies are thrown scales, as you might expect, with your Toon’s height.
• Because Bái is an Über, her party members are more likely to be concerned about her laff value. Throwing a pie at someone heals them for +1 laff, so concerned Toons may come up behind me to heal me. Although I certainly appreciate the concern, this typically makes it more difficult for me to stun. Not only are they partially obstructing my view, but repositioning becomes more difficult when I’m bumping into other Toons.

In any case, these are only minor concerns, so I still friccin’ did it. And would you look at that — a very solid first SOS card for Bái!:

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Franz Neckvein: Here’s my card. If you ever need a hand in battle, give a shout!

Báimiàn Húli [SpeedChat]: Have a nice day!

Building Busters^®

One day, I log’d onto Báimiàn, & found myself in DDL. Looking down upon the bed, I was surprised to see quite a few Toons in spite of the district not being particularly populated. Moreover, they didn’t seem to be in the usual beanfest formation. So I took a closer look:

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go and line up with the runners eek

like can i not be jolly??

haha hi i i i i i fixes that

“The runners”? What’s going on? Wanting to be a runner myself, I lined up.

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ok Lets roll

ok folks lets roll to pajama

[…]t my new toon

Alrighty…! Off to Pajama Place, then, I s’pose!

As it turned out, this was a Building Busters^® event, hosted regularly by ATTA^[1] — twice a week, I think it was. The rules are simple: load & go. A dedicated Toon is then parked just outside of the gag shoppe, with a thought bubble indicating what street is currently having its Cog Buildings “busted”.

I only did one building, but it was a good bit of fun. At the very least, it was exciting to accidentally stumble my way into an event that I’d never heard of before!

Footnotes for “Building Busters^®”

1. [↑] ATTA (= Adult Toontown Addicts) has been around for a long time — so long, in fact, that they’re still based out of Facebook™^®! Yikes!! I can’t in good conscience link directly to that place, but if you insist, their page is at /groups/toontownatta. My knowledge of ATTA is mostly limited to all-too-frequently rolling my eyes at Toonyms that incorporate the group’s name; typically “W’Atta Remarkably Original Name”, or similar.

Noöne tells Bái what she can or cannot do

Liking my new look?:

It’s something of a compromise between Bái’s original look & her Hallowe’en outfit — plus, I get to wear some heart antennæ! And I’m gonna need this powerful new outfit, because I’m about to be facing some powerful foes!

Who ever said that Übers only do SBHQ? I was invited to Mint it up with Harley, & so Bái made a trip to CBHQ to check out the Coin Mint for the first time. Unfortunately, however, our ToonHQ group failed to fill up before Harley had to leave, so Bái’s first CBHQ experience would have to wait for another day.

…Or would it? It just so happened that, not long after Harley log’d off, another group was forming around the Coin Mint elevator in that same district. Without having moved nor said anything myself, that group sent me an invite — & how could I resist?

This is perhaps not the greatest of starts. Although the Cogs are no more powerful than is to be expected of an ordinary Coin Mint battle, my party members are similarly no more powerful than is to be expected of random noobs hanging around the Coin Mint elevator. And given our situation, first-picking an Elephant Trunk is just getting off on the wrong foot.

Nonetheless, with some gag-pick negotiation here & there, getting through the ordinary battles wasn’t quite as painful as the above screenshot might suggest.

Of course, my true fear is the miniboss fight with The Mint Auditor at the end. At this time, I had some vague ideas — to be gradually refined much later on — about what an Über-friendly Mint Auditor strategy might look like. But because I was running entirely with randoms — & relatively newbish ones, at that — I knew perfectly well that I had to roll with whatever intuitions my party members were bringing with them.

I knew what the basic received wisdom was for this fight, had a decent grasp of crunching the relevant numbers, & so just picked whatever seemed like the best gag — & generally picked last. I guided my party members gently, if at all, & it wasn’t long before I was bonking The Mint Auditor into the next dimension:

That’s not to say that there weren’t any scary moments! With the Auditor blown to smithereens, a level 11 Robber Baron absolutely toppled all four of us with a whopping 18 damage each…:

…Which was swiftly followed by a rather awkward Big Magnet miss:

But overall, my luck was really rather good — beginner’s luck, I s’pose. So I friccin’ survived! I honestly wasn’t particularly expecting that!!

So how’s that for some Über content? 😉

Bulling w/ randos

And, speaking of Minting, Rusa did her first Bullion Mint (that is, my first-ever post-UNM Bull) back in the “Taking the Bullion by the horns” section of the fourteenth instalment. That was a fantastic & rather exciting introduction to the new facility, but although I hadn’t previously met Scooter, I would not describe it as “running with randoms”; it was a (relatively speaking) very special run where we decided to trio it as friends.

So, with Rusa still grinding some CBHQ here & there, it came time to do some more Bulling… with randoms, this time.

It was here where I first encountered the Bullion version of the Giant Stomper Room:

In the above screenshot, it looks substantially the same as you’d see in a Coin. But I was thrown off by the fact that the stompers are extra fast, & so I learnt the hard way that the stompers also deal substantially more damage in Bullions! Ow!!

As usual, extra-difficult UNM facilities means extra-funky Cog levels:

But the Actual Challenge™, as in any UNM content, is concentrated entirely into the single miniboss fight at the very end. In our case, Naptune was on the infamous “Defeat 6 Level 16+ Cogs” ToonTask, & was apparently hoping to complete that outside of a Field Office.

Level 16+‽‽‽ Yes. So. That means allowing The Mint Auditor to promote the other Cogs for a while, so that at least one of them can hit the level 16+ mark. In an ordinary Bullion, this would never happen, so we have to stall. Stalling means taking extra hits from the sup, as well as extra hits from nonsup Cogs which cannot be kept Lured because either they’ve just been Promoted, or they have the Attentive status condition as a result of the sup’s Investment.

The natural way to stall is to just use Cogs Miss:

This has always been the usual strategy, except that normally, you’d do this during The Boiler fight, which has the additional perk that Cogs can respawn. Before UNM, the Boiler fight was actually the only place where it was even possible to encounter level 16+ Cogs!^[1] So the idea of doing it in a Bullion is a bit exotic, but I guess I understand the motivation…?

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Naptune

ToonTasks

• Collect 250 Stolen Jokes : 144 of 250 collected
• Defeat 6 Level 16+ Cogs : 2 of 6 defeated

Alright, I think I understand the motivation less now. They needed 106 more Stolen Jokes anyway, plus more Tasks after that which also require SBFOing! Just do SBFOs!! …Or four more rougher-than-usual Bullion Mints at one level 16+ Cog defeated per run… :P

In any case, that was definitely enough to get my promo. Time to C.F.O.!

In this particular C.F.O., we encountered this bug, whereby someone who times out during the C.F.O. victory dance causes everyone else to get stucc:

It is a little eerie! Running about the C.F.O.’s room without anything there… no more cranes, no more C.F.O.… Just Blue, dancing all alone — trapt in the void…!

Footnotes for “Bulling w/ randos”

1. [↑] In fact, the Task was even worse back then: it required level 18+ Cogs rather than 16+! (Sources: [1], [2].)

More Übershenanigans

But let’s get back to the Übering, shall we?

You’re an Uber™^®…? Can I get a ride?

Alright, nerd. Hop in. This is a one-way route to SBHQ. But along the way, we’ll be taking a stop at a Sellbot Cog Building or two to pick up some Merits.

Ah-hah! A feline of excellent tastes!! Black Thunder’s build is vaguely similar to mine (but with Squirt, & org Throw instead of Drop), so I friended him after this building run. During the run, one Queen Precioussparkles had things to say about Black Thunder’s build:

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Queen Precioussparkles: ur gags and laff haha

Báimiàn Húli: seems normal to me

I mean, both of us have gags & maxlaff like this. Maybe you’re the peculiar one, your Highness?

In any case, I didn’t need very many Merits, so it was time to V.P. again:

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Ling Ling: im not killing them

Báimiàn Húli: it seems we are at an impasse

What can I say? I wouldn’t hurt the Blue Man Group!

But then, King Megaspeed did the unthincable…:

Although V.P. is the natural habitat of Übers, people are typically still surprised to see Übers in their V.P. runs.

With any luck, though, they’ll still respect you.

And for better or worse, sometimes the baby has to save herself:

And finally, I did some more glorious Cog Building spam with Harley. One building in particular proved to be quite the test of our patience, & of my ability to dodge Big Wigs’ attacks:

“Uh oh”, indeed. Although we were able to quickly take out the low-HP one, our attempts to so quickly take out the others — thus salvaging the situation — were multiply thwarted. First, I tried a Wedding Cake:

Ah, but of course!! With me still managing to survive yet another round, Harley shot ’em into the skies with a good ol’ Geyser:

Phewf!! 😅

Companion App

Although I’ve yet to make good use of it, I was introduced to a new ✨⁠fancy⁠✨ feature of the TTR client:

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The Shticker Foundation is trying to connect as a Companion App, would you like to allow this?

Originated from https://shticker.org.

OK No

This is some pretty wild stuff. All you have to do is open a “Companion App” — in this case, The Shticker Foundation’s fishing app — in your browser or whatever, & it magically friccin’ communicates with your TTR client‽

To my knowledge, this wizardry is achieved with a local (that is, localhost) WebSocket connection. Because WebSocket is just for TCP (basically, sending packets over a network), this isn’t, like, some kind of sketchy security hole. At absolute worst, one app (either the TTR client or your browser) could (theoretically??? IDFK, I’m not a hackor) DoS the other app by spamming it with WebSocket packets — but that’s pretty easy to defend against, & surely you somewhat trust both apps anyway, or else you wouldn’t be doing this!

So, hopefully I’ll be making use of this in the future; for fishing (not to be confused with phishing, which is a security threat), if nothing else! Also, if you know about any TTR Companion Apps apart from The Shticker Foundation’s, let me know! I’m curious about what’s out there.

Until next time! Stay chooned!! 💛

Sunday funnies

Funny papers (crossword puzzle not included)

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Báimiàn Húli: im an uwuber, you know

Harley: logging off

Báimiàn Húli: hahahaha

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tarandus: yuh

Gock: i hear your yuhs in my head as baimian huli’s singular rruff