Abra, hihi!!

it was a struggle to find the effect, but i found the sg_planet_trail_ribbon texture. its used in 6 effects with hashed names

which is colored by these bitimages

theres 2 slightly different effects for each of the three types of trail. the latter three files have a width of 5 instead of 8, 250 segments instead of 300, and are less opaque. they seem to be used for planets' moons

my best idea for why they stay is that that, possibly, they just dont start out at their max length and just take a really long time to get there. notice how they have 300 segments of length 2.5, that makes for a length of 750 units (whatever the units may be)! that seems really long!

this is especially evident from the fact that the length does cap at some point. this is from half an hour of recording. you can also see the planet stopped moving at some point?? it did resume afterwards so no clue what that was about

and yeah see, theyre not getting any longer, this is after leaving it here an hour

me:

Groove-Billed Ani

Hoatzin

Day 997 (3 days left)