Hard-clearing in Among Us: What is it and how to counter it
Among Us offers several ways for crewmates to know for certain who is part of the crew.
Witnessing a fellow crewmate perform a visual task, or do a crewmate only action, is a guaranteed way to identify who a member of the crew is. Hard-clearing is one of the tools crewmates have to fight back against the danger of impostors, and one of the things impostors need to know how to fight back against the most.
Ways to hard-clear in Among Us
It will come as no surprise that visual tasks are one of the best ways to hard clear crewmates in Among Us. When the visual tasks option is turned on, some tasks will give a visual indicator that shows that they are completing a task. Since impostors cannot do tasks in Among Us, this effectively guarantees that whoever is doing the task is a crewmate.
But visual tasks aren't the only thing that can hard-clear a crewmate in Among Us. With visual tasks turned off, players can still hard clear by using the “Submit Scan” task. Because only one crewmate can be on the scanner at a time, other crewmates with the task will be told to wait if someone else is on it, again confirming that the person ahead of them is a crewmate.
Tasks aside, another way to hard-clear is when there is only one impostor in the game and a kill happens in a situation where crewmates can account for the totality of one another’s actions. This can happen in games where there is only one impostor by design, or where the crew knows for certain that only one impostor is left due to either having confirmed ejects on or through obvious deduction.
Hard-clears are somewhat rare to have happen without visual tasks on and are incredibly useful for crewmates for turning the tide against the impostors in Among Us. Knowing how they happen, and how to fight against them, are vital for giving impostors a chance to play against crewmates that have hard-cleared members.
What can an impostor do about someone who is hard-cleared?
Fighting against hard-cleared crewmates in Among Us is a difficult job, but there are a few tricks impostors can use.
With visual tasks off, impostors only need to worry about a few possible hard-clear situations. They have to worry about crewmates who are fully accounted for by other players, and they have to worry about med bay scan queuing.
Crewmates who spend their entire time grouped up with someone else can be troublesome, but they can be dealt with. Sabotages, such as lights, can give players a chance to sneak in a kill without the other seeing, effectively breaking up the group. Another method is for two impostors to group up and score a double kill, though that requires a bit more coordination.
The other thing to worry about is when multiple players are doing the med bay scan task. Because Among Us doesn’t have any way to remove this task’s restrictive elements, it is still one of the strongest tasks in the game. Because of this, sometimes crewmates will ask others to follow them to the task so that they can clear each other.
If this happens, impostors should try to get as many of the crewmates to join in as possible. If everyone is there, turning off the lights can effectively require that all players stack up to see the queue. This allows imposters to stack-kill and hopefully chip away at the hard-cleared members of the crew.
There are a lot of mind games that go into playing Among Us. Depending on each Among Us playgroup, impostors and crewmates will want to employ different strategies to fight one another.