after you kill a smoker zombie and his smoke has been indoors the texture of the smoke will remain, obscuring any items that may have been on the ground. note that you do not get damaged lungs by breathing in the bugged smoke. the smoke will not spread but will cover the entire room.
I’ve noticed that smoke tends to be really obnoxiously persistent indoors… but I don’t think I’ve found any of it to be bugged smoke (safe?); mostly, it seems to be real smoke (ie: horribly toxic and life-threatening). Part of the bug is probably the tile-updating mechanics (which continue to be wonky); just like fire, if smoke is present in an area, it’ll continue to be there until you return to the area, which is inconvenient for in-building smoke, since it tends to like filling a building and then staying there until you personally enter the place to air it out. Don’t think there’s really a fix for that short of a complete rewrite of the tile update system… which is probably in the pipes, given the addition of farming.
Related: smoke is improbably dangerous to the unprotected. I’ve lost more than half my health to smoke-related coughing before, after fighting smokers (and I usually roll with 14 strength, so these aren’t weakling asthmatics or anything). I get that the ‘right’ answer is probably ‘you should get protection’, but sometimes, the right items just don’t seem to spawn; it’d be nice if there were more options available, both for dealing with smoke, and with the aftereffects of breathing it.
I would like to point out that heavy smoke inhalation is dangerous without protection, so much so that the majority of fire related deaths aren’t from the fires but are rather from the smoke.
I do agree that smokers should probably be changed to an opaque “mist” rather then actual smoke, and that we should have a “hold your breath” command that allows you to temporarily hold your breath to avoid smoke (at the cost of other penalties).
To clarify: yes, I’m aware that smoke is in fact dangerous… my complaint is largely that it doesn’t seem to be represented well. As is, my smoke exposure tends to be something like running into a smoky area, killing the smoker in a couple rounds of melee combat, immediately running out again, and then slowly dying over the course of a few hours, as my health gets slowly whittled down by coughing… for which the treatment is ‘bandaging the torso’, which doesn’t make much sense, especially if this is intended to represent carbon monoxide poisoning.