Disney's Toontown Online
Disney's Toontown Online was an online massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG) that launched in 2003 and was shut down in 2013. It now lives on through a number of fan iterations, using a combination of ripped and new code & assets to create modern versions of the game.
We grew up playing the original, back when it was still being run by Disney and had a subscription membership service. These days, fan servers are free, meaning more players can experience the full game, and at their own pace without rushing to get the most out of their subscription.
This page has links to popular servers, as well as our personal experiences with different mechanics like fishing and doodle training. We might post server reviews here as well, or other generally Toontown-related creative content.
Want to play?
You're in luck! There are number of private servers still running.
Corporate Clash is an updated, more modern version of the original game, and is the one we personally play the most!
If you get frustrated with the jank of the original and want a more streamlined experience, this might be the version for you.
Toontown Rewritten is perhaps the most popular "true to form" Toontown server available. It stays truer to the original than many other private servers, although it does have new content releases.
Want to suggest a server for me to try out? Email me at saltweb@proton.me!
Basic Gameplay
Despite differences between versions, the basic gameplay loop of Toontown remains the same:
1. Earn jellybeans (fishing, minigames, tasks)
2. Spend jellybeans on gags (weapons)
3. Use gags to complete tasks (usually fighting cogs)
4. Repeat from step 1
There's some nuance to be sure, like you're not always fighting the same cogs in the same ways,
and there are a few boss fights. But boiled down to its bare essentials, OG Toontown was an incredibly
grindy, often dull experience.
The in-game area "The Brrgh" was notorious for its sudden spike in task "difficulty". Tasks suddenly required
players to defeat upwards of 50 or even 100 cogs as they approached higher Laff levels. This gets more insidious when you remember
that Toontown used to be a subscription service... this problem, unfortunately, rears its ugly head again
over the next few segments.
Fishing
Fishing is where I spent most of my time. Specifically, fishing alone at my estate, trying to catch
the elusive Holey Mackerel.
Player estates are one of the easiest places to catch them.
Image Source: Toontown Fandom Wiki
Or a Devil Ray. There were plenty of fish that had absurdly low catch rates, and on top of that, some fish were locked behind certain fishing rods, which had to be purchased with jellybeans. Progressing fishing was slow going.
Weirdly enough, it was actually a better idea to hold off on buying the best rod. A better rod increased the pool of fish you could catch at any given moment, which technically decreased your odds of getting any of the previous tier of fish.
Most fan servers have increased the catch rates for certain fish, and for good reason. Once again, remembering that the original game had a subscription payment model makes the obnoxiously grindy aspects of fishing seem suspiciously intentional.
Doodle Training
Doodles are mysteriously absent from Corporate Clash, and I have heard that this has something to do with
the back-end code for Doodles being so atrociously bad that it makes the entire rest of the game run worse. I would believe this,
because Doodles barely ever "worked" at all.
Doodles could learn tricks that would essentially function as "Toon-ups", or healing abilities, in combat. You could train your Doodle,
then call it through the SOS menu to have it do a trick and hopefully heal your team.
In order to train your Doodle, you'd give them a command in chat, one at a time. If they successfully executed the command, they'd learn it
a bit more, but they'd also get tired during this process. More expensive Doodles from higher-level playgrounds had better stats,
which means they'd be confused less often and get tired slower.
This took forever, and was functionally useless. The time spent fully training a Doodle could be more effciently used to farm items that
would have similar (often better) effects. Having a fully trained or even just not-useless Doodle was more of a bragging right than anything else, and
yet another subscription time-waster.
The Other Stuff that Doesn't Matter Because It's Not Fishing or Doodle Training
There's a lot of other stuff to do. Like, you know, that main gameplay stuff I mentioned before; the original game
had a few "dungeon"-esque areas with unique bosses and rewards. Modern fan servers often add even more of this content, too!
Corporate Clash has an entirely new Cog branch.
Image Source: Corporate Clash Fandom Wiki
There's plenty to do with friends, too. There are a ton of different minigames, and some even have their own tracked stats like minigolf and go-kart racing. You can spend hours on these activities alone!
You can even customize your own kart!
Image Source: Toontown Fandom Wiki
And Gardening
Every account has an estate where the characters all live in their own houses. You can buy furniture for and decorate your
house (another mechanic I didn't mention), but the most involved things you could purchase off of the catalog were gardening supplies.
Gardening supplies let you plant flowers outside your house, and grow gags on gag trees that would give you damage bonuses and
help you save money on restocking.
Flowers and trees took real-life days to grow, though, once again meaning that without continued payment of the subscription fee your
garden would wither, and you'd lose your gag benefits.
They Killed Mickey
What if I told you "Barnacle Boatyard" used to be called Donald's Dock? Or that Mezzo Melodyland
was once called Minnie's Melodyland? Or that Toontown Central used to be named- well, that one was always Toontown Central.
But Mickey Mouse used to live there! He used to walk around!
He actually might still be there in Rewritten.
Image Source: ToontownDock (YouTube)
It's not a huge surprise that they removed these models from the game, despite keeping a lot of other assets. Disney is still particularly defensive of a lot of their "brand" characters, and it's safer for fan projects to just omit them entirely.
They don't do much but walk around and say hi, anyway. It's a good thing Disney doesn't seem to care much at all about the Toontown-specific characters and assets...
MAYOR FLIPPY BELONGS TO THE PEOPLE!
Image Source: Toontown Rewritten