Good news, at least for those who relax by sowing distrust in their friendship group and then plunging a knife into one of their backs when no one is looking: For the first time since 2021, Among Us is getting a new map.

The social murder ‘em up, which exploded in popularity in 2020, puts you and your friends into the space-booties of a Crew of interstellar explorers. Unfortunately, at least one of your number is an Impostor who wants nothing more than to kill off everyone around them. If you’re not the Impostor, you must complete your daily tasks around the map—such as cleaning the ship’s O2 filters or fixing its shower—and identify who is knocking off your friends. If you are the Impostor, you need to sabotage the Crew’s efforts, kill them off one by one, and try not to get identified in the process.

Since Among Us first released in 2018, the team at Innersloth has released four maps for the game, never sticking to one setting. The original Skeld map takes place on a turtle-shaped spaceship. Next came MIRA HQ, a floor in a corporate skyscraper. Then Polus, a polar science facility. Finally, in 2021 Innersloth added The Airship, a massive level featuring ladders and moving platforms.

Now, Innersloth is releasing The Fungle, a new map that sees the Crew crash-landing on a desert island filled with carnivorous plant life with a taste for astronauts in cute rubber suits.

From the start, the team knew The Fungle would be a desert island, but beyond that, game designer Dave Tamayo had fairly free rein.

“I first started by sketching out a ton of different shapes that the map could be,” Tamayo says. He went through many iterations—even drawing one that was Crewmate-shaped—before settling on the final version. Split into a beach, a cluster of highlands, and a mysterious jungle, Tamayo says he “landed on a shape that was well balanced for gameplay and had the most potential.”

Each region of the map has unique opportunities and challenges for the Crew and the Impostors. The beach, for instance, is a wide open space that gives “Impostors plenty of chances to find someone alone,” says Tamayo. Meanwhile, the highlands let people higher up see further than the players below. On the one hand, this may allow a survivor to spot an Impostor doing some nefarious deed—but an Impostor at a higher elevation can also stalk a Crewmate unseen. Then there’s the carnivorous plant-filled jungle, which Tamayo says “has lots of twists and turns and limited visibility.”

As dangerous as that sounds, the original version of the jungle was much deadlier. “I wanted to give [the desert island] a real sense of mystery, like it was a living thing that was threatening the Crewmates,” Tamayo says. In an early version, “parts of the jungle would actually move. This made the jungle feel alive and dangerous because the movement made for great Impostor hiding spots to kill and hide bodies in.”

However, the team decided to cut the feature because it worked a little too well. “The jungle area felt so dangerous that players never left the beach and would avoid venturing into the jungle,” Tamayo explains. “We wanted to make sure players explored all the corners of the map with a tangible reason, so I had to scrap the moving parts feature and go back to the drawing board.”

While the trailer tells the story of a crash landing and the geography of the map shows that the Crewmates are new to this land, you’ll also pick up the dire nature of the situation from the tasks you’ll be performing. “With the previous maps, the tasks were very mechanical, electronic, and clean. For The Fungle, many tasks center around survival and rebuilding,” Tamayo says. In the trailer, for instance, we see that one task involves preparing a plate of food from harvested plants. It’s a far cry from downloading data from the comms array on the bridge of the Skeld.

These unique tasks speak to one of the challenges of making new maps for Among Us. With each new map, Innersloth has grown more ambitious. The team has created unique tasks and sabotage events for players to conduct, new tools to help detect Impostors or confuse survivors, and means of navigating the ever-larger maps. It means that no matter how many lessons the team learns while making one map as good as possible, many are unique to that map and its particular tasks and sabotages.

The team does a huge amount of internal playtesting to learn those lessons. “All of Innersloth got to play and give feedback so that we could keep fine-tuning and polishing it until it was ready for release,” Tamayo says.

Complicating matters is how much impact a small change can have. “Rooms, tasks, sabotages, vents, abilities, and map mechanics all need to work together smoothly,” Tamayo says. “When I moved a vent from one room to another, it caused a ripple effect that made me revisit the tasks, sabotages, and abilities. I had to check all of these other components to make sure that they weren’t underpowered or overpowered because of this vent change.”

What each new map does—and this has fed into the development of The Fungle—is teach the team what the absolutes of an Among Us map should be. For instance, the last map Innersloth released, The Airship, was the largest level the team had made for the game. “The biggest learning we took from that is the limits on how big a map should be,” Tamayo explains. As a map scales, it creates more space for players to explore—but it also reduces the opportunities for them to run into one another or to be spotted getting up to something skullduggerous. As a result, Tamayo says, “The Fungle is probably about 80% the size of The Airship.”

While the map may be smaller, that’s not to say it won’t hold any mysteries. Innersloth may have replaced The Fungle’s shifting forests with a static, learnable maze of trees and plants, but Tamayo says there’s a secret in there that will still catch players off guard. He’s glad they got rid of the shifting woods, because he “ended up designing a way better feature for the jungle,” though what exactly it is and whether it will benefit the Crew or Impostors, he wouldn’t say.

“Try out the update to experience it for yourself,” Tamayo replied. Based on all the other dangers in The Fungle, I suspect it will be deadly.

When you’re ready to brave this desert island—and your own friends—you’ll find Among Us on the Epic Games Store.