by MagicManICT » Thu Apr 25, 2019 7:36 pm
There's a large portion of this game that is difficult to access if you can't log in at least every 8 hours while it is going on.
As far as the time frame mentioned... It's hard to say. From what I understand, 5 hours is the absolute minimum, but I'd have to know more details before saying you have an edge case, or were just unlucky. I've certainly seen animals in the fight mode for longer than 5 hours, and they don't necessarily despawn if you miss a window. If you miss enough of them, yes, they will. If the wiki is lacking information on this, it's because we the players haven't been able to organize accurate information, and there's no point in filling the wiki with wrong information.
There is also a bug. I don't recall if it was ever fixed. If the animal is leashed near map section boundaries, it can get despawned because it looses track of it's hitch when different map sections load and unload. (One map section being a 100x100 tile area you can see through the maps displayed in game.)
Opinions expressed in this statement are the authors alone and in no way reflect on the game development values of the actual developers.