Can your posting rhythm keep a trail alive, or does attention evaporate before anyone follows? Your star turns white when it posts and leaves a bright spot that spreads and fades.
Try this Raise evaporation-rate from 10 to 22 while it runs (it takes effect live). Trails fade faster than foragers can top them up: within about two simulated days marked-patches falls to 0, flickering up briefly after each of your posts.
About this model Where it ends up
A MathPets model of attention as a trail field, in the style of slime-mold and ant-trail models, seeded from aggregate X statistics (no post text is used). Only your posts create attention: foragers follow it and reinforce it but never start a trail. The run lasts one simulated week, one tick per hour.
Each hour you take one step, partly up the gradient, and post with a chance that peaks at peak-hour and drops by night-share before 6 a.m.; a post adds deposit-amount × (0.6 + engagement-power/50) to your patch and costs 5 energy. Each forager follows the gradient with probability follow-strength percent and otherwise wanders; on a patch holding more than 2, it adds deposit-amount × 0.35 with probability 12 + engagement-power/6 percent. Then the field diffuses by diffusion-rate percent and evaporates by evaporation-rate percent. Clicking the board adds 50.
Energy regrows at 0.35 an hour and you can't post below 6, which caps you at about 17 posts a week whatever posts-per-day says. The presets differ mainly in evaporation and deposits: Dry feed (evaporation 22%, weak deposits) never marks a patch, while Sticky trails (5%, strong deposits) keeps about 300 marked.
