How Among Us modders built roles before Innersloth did

Among Us launched on mobile in June 2018 to almost no one. Innersloth, a studio of three people, kept patching it for two years while it sat near the bottom of the charts. Then in mid-2020 the streamer Sodapoppin started playing it on Twitch, others followed, and by September a tiny indie game had millions of people arguing about who vented near electrical. The game they were playing was deliberately simple: crewmates do tasks, impostors kill and lie, everyone votes. There was no menu of special abilities. The complexity people remember came mostly from outside the studio.

A three-person game and a community with opinions

Vanilla Among Us is lean by design. You are a crewmate or an impostor, and that is the whole role system. For a casual lobby that is plenty. But the surge brought in players who wanted more texture: a crewmate who could investigate, an impostor who could disable cameras, a third faction whose goals did not line up with either side. Innersloth, run by Marcus Bromander, Forest Willard, and Amy Liu, could not ship that fast. The team was small, the game was built in Unity, and they were already scrambling to keep servers alive for a game that had outgrown its infrastructure overnight.

So players built it themselves. Among Us is a Unity game written in C#, and although the shipping build is compiled through IL2CPP rather than left as plain managed code, a modding stack grew up specifically to reach into that runtime. That is where BepInEx comes in.

BepInEx and the modding stack

BepInEx is a general-purpose patching and plugin framework for Unity and other .NET games, with support for IL2CPP builds like Among Us. It loads before the game does, sits between Unity and the game's own code, and lets a plugin run custom C# at startup. For Among Us specifically, modders leaned on HarmonyX, the runtime patching library BepInEx ships with, to rewrite game methods in memory: intercept the function that assigns roles, add new ones, draw extra buttons on the HUD, change win conditions. None of this touched Innersloth's source. It was all done by hooking the compiled methods at load time, often through an Among Us specific helper framework called Reactor.

That stack is why the Among Us modding scene grew the way it did. You did not edit a decompiled project. You wrote a Harmony patch, picked the method you wanted to grab, and let BepInEx inject it.

Town of Us and the role mods

The mod most people mean when they say "Among Us with roles" is Town of Us. It added a deep roster of crewmate, impostor, and neutral roles: a Sheriff who could shoot but died if they shot someone they were not meant to, a Jester whose only goal was to get voted out, a Medic, an Engineer who could fix sabotages from anywhere, a Mayor who could bank and stack votes. The parallel project The Other Roles pushed its own large set of roles and modifiers, including a Mayor whose vote simply counted twice. These mods turned a thirty-second social game into something closer to a tabletop deduction game with a rulebook, and the role names became common vocabulary in the community long before the studio adopted any of them.

The catch was distribution. These were client-side mods that rewrote a paid game's assemblies, so everyone in a lobby usually had to install the same version to play together, and the mods broke every time Innersloth shipped a patch. The fun was real; the friction was constant.

When the studio answered

Innersloth watched all of this. In a November 2021 update the game folded official roles into vanilla for the first time: Scientist, Engineer, Guardian Angel, and Shapeshifter. The names and exact powers were the studio's own, but the direction was the one the community had been demonstrating for a year. The official Engineer, free to use the vents, and the Guardian Angel watching from the dead both rhymed with abilities the role mods had already shipped to anyone willing to install BepInEx.

It is a tidy example of how modding can function as unpaid R&D. The mods proved there was an appetite for deduction-game depth inside a game that started as a minimalist party experience, and they did it in public, at scale, with real lobbies as the test bench. Innersloth did not copy a mod. They read the room the mods had built, and then they built their own version into the game everyone already owned. The mods still exist, still chasing the latest patch, still adding roles the official game never will.