By default, footprints in sand form and then fade in 1.8 seconds, the bulk of the full-depth footprint lasting for under a single second. This bugs me!

Even worse, when you walk through a liquid, like a blood surface, you leave little puddles as you walk or run onto other surfaces. These fade in under three seconds, which doesn't even make sense! How can it evaporate or soak in so fast??

PLEASE READ THE INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS – NOT A NORMAL MOD INSTALLATION!!

Footprints makes footprints last longer:

Sand: 180 seconds. This is the maximum possible and feels entirely reasonable, especially since once you get far enough away, reload, rezone, etc. they despawn anyway.

Blood, Oil, and Ooze: 28.8 seconds. I made this shorter in case the surface gets destroyed or modified. 28.8 seconds should be plenty of time that even if you make a footprint in oil and it's lit on fire, by the time the fire dies down and the smoke clears, the original oil footprint should be gone.

Footprints also makes footsmears (puddles) last longer:

Puddles left behind after walking through all liquid types now stick around for 86.4 seconds, which makes a lot more sense for the Poison, Blood, Oil, Water, or Lava to soak into the ground or evaporate. This was the longest time I could make this work without going infinite.

~~~INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS~~~
To install: download and extract the file.

Navigate to your /Divinity Original Sin 2/Data directory. NOT your normal mods directory.

There should already be a sub-directory there called Public, but that's okay. This should only be adding files, not overwriting any, unless you already have a mod that changes the footprints files (which as of right now, there are no other such mods).

Drag and drop (or copy/cut/paste) the mod's Public directory into your /Divinity Original Sin 2/Data directory. If necessary, replace all files (though there shouldn't be any files that need replacing).


END OF INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS

FAQs:

"Where Is My Data Directory?"

For Steam users: c:/Program Files (x86)/Steam/steamapps/common/Divinity Original Sin 2/Data
For GoG it is (to the best of my knowledge): c:/GoG Games/Divinity - Original Sin 2/Data

How Do I Uninstall Footprints?

Do not delete your Data directory!!

Instead, navigate Deeper.

Go to /Divinity Original Sin 2/Data/Public/Shared/Assets/Effects/Effects_Banks/RS3_FX_Gameplay/ and delete the RS3_FX_GP_Footsteps directory.

You can also remove individual modifications by deleting the corresponding file, if there's one particular type of extended footprint you don't like. File names are self-explanatory, with "RS3_FX_GP_Footsmear_" being puddles, and "RS3_FX_GP_Footstep_" being footprints.

Why These Specific Times?

180 seconds is the maximum length of a single effect animation allowed in the engine, hence the time for sand.

For the others... the engine's granularity for sub-animation segments is 0.01% of the total length.

These animations include fade-ins and fade-outs. For the footprints, I sacrificed the fade-in, but for the liquids, still wanted to use an integer multiple that brought the total time to about 30 seconds, so went with 1.8 x 16 = 28.8.

For the footsmears, I had to keep the fade-in because of the way the animation was designed, with a lead-in section in which splashes and the like happen. The bulk of the puddle's existence is actually a looped section of the animation.

The original fade-in was 0.1 seconds, with a looped 0.1-second segment, then a 0.8-second shrinking animation, all modified with a 0.08% fade-in and a 0.67% fade-out. To keep it all looking the same, just lasting longer and with a somewhat slower fade-out, the maximum multiplier I could use was 8, to take the fade-in to the minimum of 0.01%. The looped section was also originally only looped 30 times, which I changed to the maximum 99, so... 0.8 + (0.8 x 99) + 6.4 = 86.4.

Will You Make A Custom Version To Do [xyz]?

No.

Making any changes would involve effectively recreating the entire mod, editing all or most of its 100 files, from scratch. Maybe if you paid me? XD