Among Us: Tips and Tricks

General

If you’re playing on PC, make sure to enable Mouse + Keyboard controls in the options so you can walk with WASD.

Key bindings:

• E - use
• R - report
• Q - (as impostor) kill

Terminology

• Clear - you think someone didn’t do a particular kill.
• Hard clear - you think someone is not an impostor on account of them being with you an entire round when many kills occurred or through other mechanics.
• Hard accuse - you are certain that someone is an impostor.

Maps

• Skeld
• Mira HQ
• Polus
• Airship

As a crewmate

Basic

• Never lie.
• Make sure to vote (including skip vote), else a sneaky impostor might vote just before the timer expires.
• Avoid piling on top of others on common tasks. Sneaky impostors might try to get a kill in the stack.
• Unless it is 100% certain who killed, do not vote when there are seven people left (and two impostors). This leaves you at six, which means that the impostors can sabotage a couple of seconds before the meeting cooldown ends and then mash the kill-buttons for a double-kill. If three people vouch, it still might be worth the risk. Voting at four with one impostor is also dangerous and will end the game once people know how to play.
• if you are at five or six people left with two impostors, you have to vote. Anything else leaves you open to a kill/double-kill victory.
• Generally assume that someone accusing someone else and saying definitive things such as “they vented” or “they killed X” was speaking the truth if they end up dead between meetings. Be careful following this advice outside of playing with people you know as strangers do weird things in pubs.
• Are the impostors going for a double-kill against four crewmates to end the game during a sabotage? Mash R and you might catch them killing one person before the second person dies.

Advanced

• When you report a body, consider asking where everyone is before revealing where the body was found. This can be exploited by impostors too to frame someone, but can also let you catch a lying impostor.
• Think carefully when you want to confirm someone as innocent. Do it too early and the impostors will target you and them because the fewer confirmed innocent people are a meeting, the better it is for them.

As an impostor

Basic

• Don’t stay quiet during meetings. Even if you literally saw no one or you have a suspicious story, tell people a story of where you were because it is more suspicious if you stay quiet.
• If you somehow find yourself at 5 or 6 people alive, 2 impostors, wait a bit for the meeting timer to go down, cause a outage of a sort and go for a (double-)kill.
• On maps like Polus, the layout can be exploited when there are 6 left. Sabotage reactor, go to left stabiliser. If others approach it segmented, kill one crewmate as close as possible to the reset button and get the other kill further away.
• Careful causing crises if you’re a dead impostor. Maybe mess with doors to cause suspicion, but keep it to that. You don’t know what your fellow impostor is planning.
• If you somehow are left at 6 (with two of you alive), find one person each and time the kills with the kill cooldown reset.
• If your fellow impostor is being voted off, defending them becomes rather risky as it might out you as well.
• Kill cooldown won’t go down if you’re doing any action that prevents movement (fixing lights, reactor, cams, vitals, admin table) or in a vent.

Advanced

• You generally want to kill people who are confirmed innocent. The more people suspicion can fall on during a meeting, the better for you.
• Learn the common tasks (and fake them) here. If one person has them, everyone has the same task. Check your fake task list for what common tasks are active.
• Don’t stand on a crewmate if your fellow impostor is doing so unless you’re ready to execute a double kill (when there’s two crewmates present)

Both impostors and crewmates

• Learn the wiring orders found here. As an impostor always mention a plausible order. As a crewmate, try to bust impostors with impossible orders.
• Fire up a stopwatch/clock while playing on another monitor or on a phone. This can help you keep track of time while faking tasks, catching impostors who are faking tasks, and keep track of kill cooldown timers.
• Use the ingame chat if you’re dead if you still want to listen in on the conversations of the living over voice chat.
• If you’re playing on a public server and someone asks you to tell them who the impostor is, always lie. The person asking might be talking over voice chat their friend. If you’re an impostor: that just probably won you the game. If you’re not an impostor: this is straight-up cheating and this is the right thing to do. Anyone caught doing this deserves a ban.

Situations

3v1, two crewmembers hard cleared

Crewmates should stick together as much as possible. If you’re the hard cleared one, you need to see your hard clear partner get killed without the non-hardcleared crewmate lying dead in some corner. If you are not hard cleared and there’s a split sabotage (oxygen, reactor), then it is your job to charge towards the one that the hard cleared duo isn’t doing. The duo should go to the other part of the sabotage together if it isn’t resolved in a reasonable amount of time.

As an impostor it is your best bet to snag an in-the-dark ninja vent kill on the hard cleared duo to force a showdown between you and the non-hardcleared crewmate, or kill said crewmate first and then kill any part of the duo.

How settings affect the game

• Confirm ejects should get turned off as people get more experienced with the game. With confirm ejects on, you can’t as an impostor really get away if someone accuses you of killing someone or venting.
• Visual tasks should also get turned off as well when people get more experience because it being on makes it too easy to clear people as not impostors.
• Hiding the taskbar/making it update during meetings makes it easier for impostors to fake tasks. It is in my opinion something that should be done because it helps newbie impostors fake tasks.

Q&A

Q: How do I fake doing a task as an impostor?

A: This takes a bit of experience, but in general the way you do it is that you stand at a station with a fakeable task until the global completion progress bar moves while someone is watching you do it. Careful to not move too early or too late (depending on the task). Don’t try to fake doing a very short task (such as pressing a button) or visual tasks (such as doing asteroids). With the taskbar off/update on meeting, make sure to stand still for long enough to make it plausible.

Q: Wait, if I saw someone kill and there’s seven people left, why should we not vote the impostor out?

A: It comes down to how well you can persuade your fellow crewmates. The risks are rather high - if you fail to convince your fellow crewmates the game is effectively over and it is your word against the impostor’s. It is therefore better to hard accuse someone and still skip if only you saw the kill happen. After all: the impostor has guaranteed one person on their side which means that they only need to convince two crewmates to vote you off.

Suggested additional rules

• On Polus it should not be allowed to ask which keyhole you had in the key common task. Reason: the order is determined by the order in which people joined the server. This means you can be caught out once by this and on top of this: people joining the server late won’t be able to do it.
• Similarly, it should not be allowed to ask for digits on the cards on Mira (though it is less likely someone would remember that).

What are my options in terms of playing this game on PC?

• Steam/Epic Game Store/Official store - Costs roughly 3 EUR, officially it works on Windows, but Proton (on Steam only) seems to run this flawlessly on Linux as well. You can also check isthereanydeal for cheaper deals out there.
• Bluestacks - Free, android emulator. Works on Windows and Mac. Not really recommended as it eats way more performance and is unwieldy.

We’re waiting for someone to join, what should we do?

Here’s a list of easy to play online games/activities you can play/do together:

• skribbl.io - One person draws something, others guess what that thing is.
• Watch2Gether - Watch videos in sync
• Spyfall - Spies try to figure out what the location is. One player starts by asking another player a question - any kind. Full rules here. Bonus for being somewhat on theme with Among Us.

Contributors

• TZer0
• Madmazel/Tango