Quote Originally Posted by JamieRose View Post
Can someone please explain the point of time gating certain spawns like the Goobbue and then having them run away for days of real time the nanosecond you arrive to try to catch one?
They wanted people who haven't leveled fisher to be able to experience the same soul-crushing anguish of the folks who are trying to complete their fishing log. After all, you have the gatherer experience (getting materials) and the crafter experience (making feed/tools/whatever), you needed an island equivalent of FSH to complete the set.

(I say this as a joke... but I kind of only halfway mean it as a joke.)

That said, unlike the masochistic nightmare that is Fishing (Savage) in this game, you can make the animals respawn. If you fail to catch the alligator, but the window in which the alligator appears is still going to go on for another 15 minutes, you can leave your island and come back and find it's back again. Spawns are not among the data the island persists between instances; if you enter your island fresh and it's within the window for the critter, the critter is there... even if it ran off five minutes ago before you left your island.

Which does not really make the RNG factor less annoying, I grant, but does make the rare animals (slightly) less time-consuming to catch.