Age of Empires IV: How to Rebind Locked Hotkeys

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.

• 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.
  
• When using hotkeys like Control+Shift+V the option to rebind the shortcut in-game will be greyed out like the rest since the game does not support these. You can still change them through the editor though.
  
• While the grid layout is labeled as “modern dynamic” layout in the file, there is an option for “classicKeys”. Setting it to true doesn’t change anything so maybe they were already working on classic hotkeys.
  
  

• You can free the ALT key which is currently locked for turning the camera. To leave empty, just delete the key phrase without deleting the quotation marks.
  Before:
  
  
  After:
  
  In my case I changed said key to MouseMiddle.
• You can rebind keys like Select all Villagers, Send all back to Work and Select all Military.
• You can use “Control+Shift+[insert letter]” for other shortcuts.
• You can rebind mouse panning to any key and even the left or right mouse button. Setting it to the latter will make the game unplayable though, so consider pairing it with another key like Alt:
  
• You can set multiple shortcuts to the same key, but keep in mind that it may result in weird control behavior (especially when going for WASD camera controls without changing the grid layout).
• Setting the camera controls to WASD works but in my experience you have to unbind the secondary keybinds.
  Before:
  
  After:
  
• You can combine keys for the grid layout hotkeys.
  

• Activating the dev camera named “capture tool”, does not matter which keys you bind it to
  
• Using the Mouse Side Buttons (I can’t find the correct key function to make AOE4 recognize them, in the worst case the devs have to update the engine to support these buttons since relic games like COH2 don’t support them as well afaik).

Thanks to Lord DGP for his great guide on how to rebind locked hotkeys, all credit to his effort. you can also read the original guide from Steam Community. enjoy the game.