Online 404 Base Building: Fortifying With Scrap Car Parts

Online 404 base building is wood-first with scavenged reinforcement, and the developer has given one very concrete example of what that means: rip a car door or hood off an old vehicle and bolt it to your wooden wall. Official artwork on the store page shows exactly that, a log cabin whose walls are covered in red, blue, green and orange doors and bonnets taken from wrecks. Bases can be fortified, and they can be raided, but the depth of the building system is something the developer has not detailed.

• Structure: wood is the primary building material
• Reinforcement: scavenged parts, with car doors and hoods as the store page example
• Threat: the developer's April 2026 announcement refers to raids on your base
• Placement: camps can be set up anywhere in the district
• Open question: how deep the building system goes has never been specified

What do you use to build a base?

Wood, for the structure. That is the store page's framing, and it is reinforced by the scavenge-everything approach that runs through the rest of the game's design. If you need something that takes effort to manufacture, the developer's advice is generally to find an existing one and take it apart, whether that is a solar panel on an abandoned house or a door on a wrecked car.

That ethos shows up in the artwork too. The base pictured in the store page's screenshots is a plain log cabin in a forest clearing, and what makes it distinctive is the layer of scavenged car parts bolted across its walls, next to a rusted vehicle with its bonnet open and a campfire where two survivors are sitting. The point the art makes is not grandeur, it is improvisation. A repaired vehicle is treated the same way, as the thing that turns a four-square-kilometre district into something you can cross comfortably.

How do you fortify a base against raids?

By attaching other people's property to your own walls, apparently. The store page's line about bolting a car door or hood to a wooden wall is the whole official guidance on fortification, and the first public announcement adds the reason you would bother: the game has raids on your base, so a structure that can be improved and attacked is part of the core loop rather than a decorative extra.

Official source: Demo in June and release in July, April 29, 2026 There is no published list of what can be attached, how durability works, or what a raid actually involves, so the honest answer is that the fortification system is confirmed to exist and its rules are not yet public. Watch the demo-period complaints before October 16 as a rough guide to difficulty: players were already frustrated by how much searching the game asks you to do, and a base you cannot finish because you cannot find a part is exactly the failure mode that would generate that kind of talk. Our Online 404 crafting page covers how the search-driven system feeds into building.

Official source: Online: 404 on Steam

How large can an Online 404 base get?

Unknown, and worth being careful about. Coverage of the game has drawn a comparison with Sons of the Forest while qualifying it, saying base building may not be as extensive as in that game. The developer has not published a building limit, a blueprint system or a progression path for structures, and the Early Access launch on October 16, 2026 is the first time anyone outside the demo can build at all.

Preview source: GameRant coverage of Online: 404

What is confirmed is that camps can be placed anywhere in the district, using scavenged materials, and that four-player co-op is the documented maximum team size. A base therefore has to be built somewhere inside a roughly four-square-kilometre zone of pine forest, lakes, wetlands and hills that also has to be defended. What you can actually construct there is a question for the first public build.

Should you repair a car instead of building?

In a district of this size, usually yes, and the developer treats vehicle repair as one of the headline survival activities. The store page and outside coverage both present a restored vehicle as the thing that makes travel across the zone practical, as an alternative to covering the same ground on foot through forest and marsh. The research loop is the same one that drives everything else: repair knowledge comes from the phone, and parts come from wrecks.

If you are planning a group of four, the division of labour that suggests itself is one base, one vehicle, and phones in every pocket. That is speculation about how the systems interact rather than an official recommendation, but it is consistent with what has been published. Our Online 404 multiplayer page covers the confirmed party size and what is still unexplained about it.