Age of Empires IV – Advanced Users: How to Rebind Locked Hotkeys

There is a way to gain access to specific hotkeys that are currently locked, as we don’t know when the developers will patch this.

How to Rebind Hotkeys

All credit goes to Lord DGP !

1. Create a new control profile in AOE4. If anything goes wrong, you can delete this profile again.
2. Make your desired changes and save.
3. Note down hotkeys that are locked or involve multiple keys like “control+shift”.
4. Close the game.
5. Navigate to “documents\My Games\Age of Empires IV\keyBindingProfiles”.
6. Open the .rkp file using the Windows Editor or Notepad++.
7. Find the hotkeys you want to edit, change them to your likings.
8. Save
9. Start Age Of Empires IV and make sure your control profile is selected.

If you want to edit the hotkeys again, repeat step 4 – 9.

Things to Note

• When combining keys, leave no space.

• RepeatCount seems to indicate the amount of times you have to press something, but you can’t imitate control group behaviour (1x select, 2x jump to) since control groups have two interactions: one for selection, one for focus. I therefore suggest to leave them like they are.

• Mouse Buttons I know of are MouseLeft, MouseRight and MouseMiddle. Currently MouseMiddle is used to pan the camera.

• Because the game does not support hotkeys like Control+Shift+V, the option to rebind the shortcut in-game will be greyed out like the rest. However, you can still change them in the editor.

• While the grid layout in the file is labeled as “modern dynamic,” there is an option for “classicKeys.” Setting it to true has no effect, so perhaps they were already working on classic AOE4 Hotkeys.

Things That Do Work

You can unlock the ALT key, which is currently locked for camera rotation. Simply delete the key phrase without the quotation marks to leave it blank.

Before:

After:

In my case, the key was changed to MouseMiddle.

• Select all Villagers, Send all back to Work, and Select all Military can all be rebinded.
• Other shortcuts include “Control+Shift+[insert letter].”
• Mouse panning can be remapped to any key, including the left and right mouse buttons. If you set it to the latter, the game will become unplayable, so consider pairing it with another key, such as Alt:

• You can assign multiple shortcuts to the same key, but this may cause strange control behavior (especially when going for WASD camera controls without changing the grid layout).
• Setting the camera controls to WASD works, but you must unbind the secondary keybinds in my experience.

Before:

After:

• For the grid layout hotkeys, you can use a combination of keys.

Things That Don’t Work

• It makes no difference which keys you bind to the dev camera named “capture tool” when you activate it.

• Using the Mouse Side Buttons (I can’t seem to find the right key combination to get AOE4 to recognize them; in the worst case, the devs will have to update the engine to support them, as relic games like COH2 don’t).