That One Rule / Toontown Online

• In Toontown Online, knockback damage^note a +50% bonus to Throw and Squirt; note that this stacks additively, not multiplicatively, with the +20% from gag combo damage to Lured cogs would or would not apply based on a complicated set of rules, including how many cogs are in the battle, the position of the individual cog being hit, which environment the battle was taking place in, and even what order the cogs are being defeated in. Although this was originally believed by players to be an intentional game mechanic, it was later determined to be a bug. Either way, it was a massive headache, and most private servers have since made it so that all Lured cogs receive knockback. The original rules were so complex that even veteran players disagreed on what they were, with The Dogfather declaring that the knockback was actually random in some cases, and other players attributing differences in knockback rules to server lag. Here is an attempt at summarizing them:
  • In streets and boss battles, all cogs receive knockback.
  • If there is only one cog left in a battle, it will always receive knockback regardless of the context.
  • In a building, all cogs that initially appear on the floor will receive knockback.
  • When a group of cogs comes from the elevator in a building, the knockback rules depends on how many elevator cogs are remaining:
    • In a group of four elevator cogs, the far-left and middle-right cogs receive knockback.
    • In a group of three elevator cogs, including if one of the four has already been destroyed, the middle cog receives knockback.
    • In a group of two elevator cogs, including if some from the previous two scenarios have already been destroyed, neither one receives knockback.
  • In facilities, the cog that talks to the player first, and thus ends up on the right side of the battle, will always receive knockback.
  • In Factories, specifically in battles where there are only three cogs total, defeating the middle cog first will cause both of the remaining two to receive knockback.
  • Some guides will state that which cog gets "tagged" first, i.e. which one players run up to to initiate the battle, causing it to join the battle first and appear on the far-right, matters when determining knockback:
    • In the first battle of each floor in the District Attorney's Office, i.e. the battle containing all Skelecogs, tagging the cog that starts out on the far-left will result in all four cogs in the battle receiving knockback.
    • However, if the order that the rest of the cogs join the battle gets disrupted due to server latency, only the rightmost cog will receive knockback.
    • A variant of the tagging rule also reportedly applies to the Mints. If the rightmost cog is tagged, the leftmost cog will end up in the middle-left position and receive knockback, unless lag causes it to end up somewhere else in the battle, in which case it won't.
  • In the second battle of each floor in the DA Office, the leftmost cog, i.e. the one who joins the battle last, will also receive knockback. What happens next depends on which cogs the toons decide to defeat first:
    • If only the far-left cog is defeated in the first round, both of the middle two cogs will receive knockback in the second round.
    • If only the far-right cog is defeated first, it is seemingly random how knockback applies to the middle two.
    • If two of the four cogs have been defeated, both of the remaining two receive knockback.
  • In Bossbot Golf Courses, Skelecogs that emerge from v2.0 cogs will always receive knockback, no matter how many other cogs are in the battle.
  • The Cog Golf Courses also follow a similar rule to the DA Offices, where if there are exactly two cogs remaining in the battle, both will receive knockback.
• Although gag accuracy is somewhat more intentional in how it is programmed, the mechanics are still surprisingly complicated, containing various caveats and unintended consequences that are not at all intuitive:
  • First of all, all gags, with the exception of Trap, have a base accuracy value. This base value is distilled down to "Low", "Medium", or "High" (or "Perfect", in Trap's case) when shown in the gag menu. Seems simple enough, but it can be misleading in a few cases:
    • In Rewritten, the High Dive's base accuracy was increased to 95%, while all the other Toon-Up gags were kept at 70%. Despite this, the High Dive's accuracy is still listed as "Medium".
    • Lure gags vary in base accuracy between 50% (for the $1 Bill and Small Magnet) to 70% (for the $10 Bill, Hypno Goggles, and Presentation). Although 70% is considered "Medium" in Toon-Up's case, it's still listed as "Low" for the higher-end Lure gags. Also, organic Lure, unlike other organic gag tracks, has its accuracy increased by 10%, which causes all the accuracies to be listed as "Medium" instead of "Low". So if you decide to only plant organic Lure up to Big Magnet (60%+10% base accuracy), the Big Magnet and Hypno Goggles will have the same base accuracy, but the former will be listed as "Medium" while the latter will be listed as "Low" accuracy. In Rewritten, the Presentation was buffed from 70% to 90% and then 95% base accuracy, making organic-ness redundant.
  • The claim that higher level gags are more likely to hit is misleading. It's true for Toon-Up and Lure, where the base accuracy does actually change, but for the others it's actually your highest level gag for that track that determines the accuracy bonus you get. Every gag level you gain after the first results in a 10% accuracy bonus for all gags in the track. This means, for example, that your Cupcake will retroactively become more accurate as you level up in Throw.
  • In general, each cog level after the first gives the cog 5% extra "defense" that decreases gag accuracy by that amount when hitting that cog. For gags affecting all cogs, the highest cog defense is used. Again, sounds simple enough, but there are exceptions. Level 1 cogs have a defense of 2% instead of 0%, while rank 1 cogs (i.e. Cold Callers, Short Changes, Bottom Feeders, and Flunkies) at levels 4 and 5 have defenses of 12% and 15% respectively, rather than 15% and 20% for other cogs of the same level.
  • In-game tips will tell you that Sound, Throw, and Squirt "stun" cogs and make it more likely (specifically, a 20% increase per gag) for them to be hit by Drop gags, hence why Drop is placed at the bottom of the tracks. However, the "stun bonus" mechanic is far more broadly applicable than that:
    • Both the stun gag and the final gag can be of almost any track, as long as they're not the same track. This means, for example, that throwing out a Trap makes Lure more likely to hit, even though the Trap hasn't been activated yet.
    • If either the stun gag or the final gag is an Area of Effect, the stun bonus will apply regardless of what the single-target one is targeting. In a particularly counter-intuitive case, the game makes no fundamental distinction between gags affecting toons and gags affecting cogs, which means even Toon-Up (including doodle tricks, which are technically their own gag track) can serve as a stun gag for other tracks. SOS cards and pink slips are also treated as attacks for this purpose.
  • When an Area of Effect Sound, Throw, or Squirt gag is used on a mixed set of lured and unlured cogs, the resulting bonus from the cogs lured is based on what percentage of the group is lured. For example, if there are 3 cogs and two are lured, the bonus is 67%.
  • The final result of the accuracy equation for non-Trap gags is capped at 95%, so no matter how ideal the circumstances, there is always at least a 5% chance of the gag missing anyway.
  • However, it is possible for the final accuracy to be negative. Notably, this unintentionally resulted in SOS cards (supposedly an Always Accurate Attack) missing in rare cases, since the RNG roll was hardcoded to 0, still not low enough to make the attack hit. This was later fixed in Rewritten, where accuracy was set to have a lower bound of 5%.
  • It's also possible for gags to "mismatch" - despite occurring in the same round, being of the same track, and hitting the same cog, one will hit and the other will miss. This appears to be an oversight, specifically caused by the fact that attacks occurring simultaneously are only "matched" with their immediate neighbors (ignoring toons that aren't attacking at that specific moment). So if three toons all use the same gag track, but toons 1 and 3 attack cog A, while toon 2 attacks cog B, toon 3 will only try to "match" with toon 2, and the match will fail due to the targets being different. The outcomes of attacks 1 and 3, then, are calculated independently of each other. This was fixed in Rewritten in July 2018.
• Lure gets even more complicated with the "wake-up early" mechanic. Even if your Lure hits, if the accuracy of the Lure (including base accuracy, gag experience bonus, and cog defense, but not stun bonus) is below 50%, there is a random chance each round that some of the cogs will wake up prematurely. As the Lure accuracy decreases further towards 0%, the odds of cogs waking up proportionally approaches 100%. This is never explained in the game, and tends to confuse players. This mechanic was removed in Rewritten in May 2022.
• The "carry-over" mechanic with Version 2.0 cogs. V2.0s aren't just regular cogs but with twice the health - they're cogs whose outer shells and inner skeletons essentially have to be defeated separately. So for example, using a Grand Piano on a v2.0 that has 1 HP left destroys its outer shell but replaces it with a Skelecog with full health - the other 169 damage goes unused. However, each individual gag that gets used is considered a separate attack for this purpose, and combo and knockback damage are also counted separately. Once the outer shell is destroyed, the remaining attacks that have yet to be applied are said to have "carried over" to the Skelecog. One must also take into account the order that each hit is internally applied: the standard gag damage happens first, followed by gag combo damage, followed by knockback damage. This is notably contrary to how it's displayed to the player, which is knockback (shown in orange) followed by combo damage (shown in yellow).
  • In December 2021, Rewritten removed this mechanic. However, it was later replaced with "Reinforced Plating", which is itself somewhat complicated. It reduces the amount of damage done by each gag by a set amount equal to 1.5 times the cog's level, rounded down. This only applies to the outer shell, making calculating gag combos particularly difficult without a guide.
• In general, the health of a cog of level n is equal to (n+1)*(n+2), so a level 11 cog has 12*13 = 156 HP. However, level 12 cogs had their health rounded up to 200 instead of 182. In December 2021, Rewritten decided to nerf level 12 cogs' health... to 196, based on a new formula for cogs level 12 and up, where the formula is now (n+1)*(n+2)+14.

---