Spotting smoke

[Dungeon Smash]

Right now I am playing the homeland robbers quest, and it just made me think... why can't I see a smoke from the enemy cookfire?

The old man in the village mentioned that he found the robbers from the smell of their smoke... my character has high smell and eyesight and yet he seems to get no clues.

I apologize if smelling smoke already exists in the game, but I have not found it.

However, it seems a character should be able to easily pick out a column of smoke rising - especially for my character right now, as he in on a mountain overlooking a region of barren hills. 

It would be really nice if a graphic indication would appear on the worldmap to show where a campfire has been lit, especially as hunter-type NPCs in the game world can now light their own fires.  similar columns would surely appear over villages as well.  It might even be nice to have a message prompt appear as we do when a village is spotted - "You spot a column of smoke nearby".

Similarly, it would be nice if you could smell smoke when you get within 1 tile or so.  "You smell smoke on the wind."  Similar to how you can sometimes pick up tracks in an accidental fashion by walking by. 

I reckon you'd also need some method to identify a fire only once too.  It would be annoying if you keep walking by the same village tile and keep getting "I Smell smoke!!"  over and over.  Sort of the way village tiles are only "discovered" once, and tracks rarely pop up over and over from walking across the same worldmap tile.  or when you get a message saying "You hear [xyz] woodsman singing nearby"

This could also help to make the (often frustrating) robbers quest less frustrating.  A good warrior would use every clue his senses can give him.

[PALU]

I agree that seeing and smelling smoke (and seeing fires, in particular when it's dark) would make sense. However, the robbers are said to know how to stay hidden, so I'm not sure this suggestion would help in the robber quest cases. After all, you can't see smoke during the night (assuming the night is dark, i.e. away from the summer solstice), and you wouldn't see fires if the robbers put up something to block visibility of them. Using dry wood and ensuring efficient burning (blocking out the wind, for starters) would reduce the amount of smoke as well.

[Dungeon Smash]

If an old man were able to smell their campfire and stumble upon it by accident then I don't think the robbers are being especially cautious.  It's true that in the dark night my character can't see much, but in the early evening he can see a goodly ways off into the distance (enough to see animals etc) so I think he would also be able to spot a burning fire or a smoke column (if there were one).

[JEB Davis]

I think Sami mentioned a while back that he was planning to add spotting smoke as a future improvement, but I can't direct you to the post.

[Ara D.]

To the robbers I imagine that the old man was very close to smell the smoke. The brigands sure would use tricks to hide the light of the fire by night and the smoke by day

[Sami]

Right now I am playing the homeland robbers quest, and it just made me think... why can't I see a smoke from the enemy cookfire?
..
It would be really nice if a graphic indication would appear on the worldmap to show where a campfire has been lit, especially as hunter-type NPCs in the game world can now light their own fires.  similar columns would surely appear over villages as well.  It might even be nice to have a message prompt appear as we do when a village is spotted - "You spot a column of smoke nearby".
..
I reckon you'd also need some method to identify a fire only once too.  It would be annoying if you keep walking by the same village tile and keep getting "I Smell smoke!!"  over and over. 

Yep, both spotting and smelling smoke, and spotting fires from the distance would be great additions. Would love to feature them both, but it could also get pretty complex if approached in detailed fashion. You mention some of the things to consider, but also nicely burning fire doesn’t produce all that much smoke. And actually spotting smoke from long distance would require A LOT of smoke to be generated. In case of regular campfires smelling the smoke would be more common.
Many fireplace being warmed up (or better, having been started to warm up) would naturally generate smoke to be visible further away. Wind direction would matter also. And an immediate spin-off feature would be to make wild animals scared of smelling smoke.
All that would be super, but we’d probably need to start with simplified fire/smoke spotting features first.