Breaking the limits of custom rules - Among Us hex editing guide

This guide will teach you how to modify the custom game settings beyond the constraints set by the game. This includes things such as kill cooldown, vision radius, player speed, and much more.

Requirements

Have you ever wanted wacky or outlandish settings like this in your Among Us lobbies?

This guide will teach you how to tweak various custom game settings past the limits of what is normally possible in-game. This has only been tested on PC but you may be able to use similar methodology on Android.

You will need:
A hex editor (I use HxD[mh-nexus.de])
A Windows or Android copy of Among Us
Have created a game lobby at least once (might be optional)

This guide was made and is valid for 2020.09.22s, this may be patched out in the future.

Last update: 5th of November 2020 (version 2020.10.22s)
Questions? Friend me on Discord: Dabestbro#7879

Finding the game settings file

We are looking for the file “gameHostOptions”, which contains all of the default settings for your game lobby. This is loaded when the game first starts, so in order to see any changes in-game you will need to close Among Us and relaunch it.

On Windows, you can find this file in File Explorer with the following filepath:

C:\Users\youruser\AppData\LocalLow\Innersloth\Among Us

Make sure to change this to your corresponding computer user (NOT in-game username)

On Android, you can find this file with your corresponding file browser in the following filepath:

Internal storage/Android/data/com.innersloth.spacemafia/files

Before we edit stuff

There are a few things we need to do before editing any of our files.

First, if you don’t have a hex editor already, download one. I use HxD[mh-nexus.de] but anything that can read and write hex values will work fine for our purposes. Regular text editors won’t be an option as gameHostOptions reads like gibberish when imported there.

Secondly, we ALWAYS want to have a backup of our original gameHostOptions file. While I haven’t personally had any severe issues as a result of hex editing, having something to revert to if you mess up really bad is good practice. Copy your gameHostOptions file and name it “gameHostOptions original” or something similar.

After this, you’re set to begin tweaking your custom game options!

How to change your settings

First, open your gameHostOptions file in your hex editor. You should see something like this:


Each pair of numbers/letters on this screen has its own offset value, which represents its location in the file. The top left value is written in this document as “0x00”, the top right value is written as “0x0F”, and the very last value is written as “0x2B”.

To change a specific hex value, highlight what you want to change and then type over it. Modified values will show up in red so you know what you just changed.

Alternatively, highlight the desired offset(s) and use the Data inspector tool in HxD along with the corresponding data type to change its value.

Control + Z if you mess up, and make sure to reopen the game after saving your work in order to apply your changes.

What to edit

Each hex value in your gameHostOptions file corresponds to a different custom game setting. See the table below for info on what corresponds to what. (This table was originally optimised for the Google Docs version of this guide[docs.google.com], if the table here has display issues try looking there instead)

Offset	Setting	Data type	Other notes
0x00	Unknown	Unsure	Values below 03 cause issues with starting lobbies Values above 03 are reset to 03, and the language is set to Other for online lobbies. Most values seem to be reset to recommended settings - failsafe?
0x01	Max Players	Uint8	Value of 00 will tell you that the game you attempted to join is full, and defaults your lobby language to portuguese. Only happens in online lobbies, local works fine. Value of 01 crashes the game when making an online lobby (local works fine). Values 02-0A work normally. Values above 0A in online lobbies results in error “Game options received were invalid” (local works). This interaction needs more testing with local play
0x02 to 0x05	Chat language	Unsure	00 01 00 00 - English 02 00 00 00 - Spanish 04 00 00 00 - Korean 08 00 00 00 - Russian 10 00 00 00 - Portuguese 20 00 00 00 - Arabic 40 00 00 00 - Filipino 80 00 00 00 - Polish 01 00 00 00 - Other All other combinations of values result in “???” (no quotation marks)
0x06	Level	Uint8	00 - The Skeld 01 - Mira HQ 02 - Polus Values above these are automatically set back to 00
0x07 to 0x0A	Player speed	float32	Negative values invert controls, although lag compensation expects regular controls which can result in other players teleporting a lot. Extremely low/high values result in no movement whatsoever.
0x0B to 0x0E	Crewmate vision	float32	Extremely high vision values make the user effectively blind minus very specific locations. Negative vision values function as normal although shadows are drawn with decreased accuracy. 0 vision results in being unable to see anything (vents still can be viewed through fog of war)
0x0F to 0x12	Impostor vision	float32	See “crewmate vision”
0x13 to 0x16	Kill cooldown	float32	Negative values allow the impostor to instantaneously chain kills, bypassing even the 10 second starting cooldown. A value of 0 makes the kill button invisible for the impostor, but they can still kill with key shortcuts or possibly by clicking where the button normally is. Positive values work as intended.
0x17	Common tasks	Uint8	If the game has run out of unique tasks to allocate, it will assign duplicates of already assigned tasks. These duplicate tasks have unique RNG - e.g wires will differ each time. Duplicate tasks must be solved one at a time.
0x18	Long tasks	Uint8	See “common tasks”
0x19	Short tasks	Uint8	See “common tasks”
0x1A to 0x1D	Emergency meetings	int32	Negative values will not allow the crew to hold meetings. Values equal to and above 0 work as intended.
0x1E	Impostor count	Uint8	01 - One impostor 02 - Two impostors 03 - Three impostors Other values are set to the closest valid value
0x1F	Kill distance	Uint8	00 - Short 01 - Medium 02 - Long Values higher than this are set to 02
0x20 to 0x23	Discussion time	int32	If this value is negative, the game will progress to voting time but add the amount of negative discussion time to the voting timer. With negative discussion time and positive voting time, this can result in meetings instantly moving to the post-vote stage.
0x24 to 0x27	Voting time	int32	Negative values are displayed as infinity in the lobby, in the vote screen the timer is completely gone.
0x28	Recommended settings	Uint8	00 - Off 01 - On
0x29	Emergency cooldown	Uint8	The emergency meeting in the first round will always have a cooldown of at least 10 seconds.
0x2A	Confirm ejects	Uint8	00 - Off 01 - On Values higher than this are set to 01
0x2B	Visual tasks	Uint8	00 - Off 01 - On Values higher than this are set to 01
0x2C	Anonymous votes	Uint8	00 - Off 01 - On Values higher than this are set to 01
0x2D	Task bar updates	Uint8	00 - Always 01 - Meetings 02 - Never Values higher than 02 are displayed as “STRMISS” in the sidebar, and in the game settings computer it is shown as 1.5x. During a round, functions identically to "Never".

Premade rulesets

Files for all of these rulesets can be found at this google drive link.[drive.google.com]

• 1.125x movement speed (for those lobbies that REALLY need a compromise)
  
• Pacifist impostor (99999s kill cooldown, not sure how you would weave this into a gamemode but someone more creative could potentially come up with something)
  
• Literally just 20 short tasks
  
• Blackout (0.1x or even 0x crewmate vision, “lights are always out”)
  
• OP impostor (1s kill cooldown as seen here by Socksfort)
  
• Anything else you can imagine :D

(More ruleset screenshots coming soon - feel free to suggest some in the comments)

Credits

While the contents of the guide were all written by myself, I’d like to thank:

• Psyql and Jaime Shirazi for helping me test a lot of the multiplayer interactions
  
• The rest of Garfield server/Yes/Outer Heaven for putting up with my tomfoolery
  
• Socksfor1 for making his video on the concept
  
• I also believe Socksfor1 is the first to have documentation of this being possible, although if there is anybody else who has done this prior to his video let me know :D
  
• And of course, the Innersloth developers[www.innersloth.com] for making this game possible in the first place (also for not sanity checking the lobby settings too stringently 😛)

Feel free to contact me on discord (Dabestbro#7879) if you have any questions :)

[Dabestbro]

@Mirolub I would love to but probably won't end up updating the guide, full disclosure. I haven't played among us in a long time and I don't have much free time to do all the trial and error required to update everything sadly

[Mirolub]

This is the recent structure of the target folder (AppData\LocalLow\Innersloth\Among Us): link [i121.fastpic.org]
It did change and doesn't contain gameHostOptions anymore. I bet it was replaced by settings.amogus file, but can't say for sure.
Will you update the guide considering new data?

[StupidBrainSmoothie]

The file is still there and I'm still using this exact guide to get a -1 second kill cooldown. This dude doesn't know what he's talking about

[Dabestbro]

Ahhh, that's tragic. Thanks for letting me know, I'll update the guide soon to say it's deprecated

[jutmelchior]

great while it worked, but gameHostOptions is now gone and I'm not smart enough to figure out a new way. Thank you tho for having such a great tutorial!

[CINATITSMR]

I still don't understand what I'm doing.

[Dabestbro]

Gotcha, glad to hear you got it working. Me and my friends actually tried a similar thing in a small group - we set vision to like 0.05x so that you could only see your feet, and then we played on skeld with few tasks and getting info through admin/cams. It was really weird and someone would have probably come up with a super OP meta strategy but for a short couple of rounds it was a very fun mode

[Cube]

Nevermind, I was editing in the wrong place. Funny story, I edited the crewmate vision instead of the kill cooldown to zero, SO NOBODY COULD SEE ANYTHING AND THEY WERE ALL COMPLAINING XD

[Dabestbro]

I'll look into it to see if it's working in the current version of among us.

[Cube]

when i edit the file and try to make an online game it does something wierd and then just crashes :(