Fabricate has been talked about quite a lot before this article. From creating tools for a whole village to making your own money printer, Fabricate has been a staple in optimization for a while. However, There’s more we can do with this spell than most realize.

Reading the spell

Choose raw materials that you can see within range. You can fabricate a Large or smaller object (contained within a 10-foot cube, or eight connected 5-foot cubes), given a sufficient quantity of raw material. If you are working with metal, stone, or another mineral substance, however, the fabricated object can be no larger than Medium (contained within a single 5-foot cube). The quality of Objects made by the spell is commensurate with the quality of the raw materials.

Creatures or magic items can’t be created or transmuted by this spell. You also can’t use it to create items that ordinarily require a high degree of craftsmanship, such as jewelry, Weapons, glass, or armor, unless you have Proficiency with the type of artisan’s tools used to craft such Objects.

Exoptable Money / Your own money printer

This has been standard in high-op dnd for a while now, and I sadly can’t remember who brought this to my attention first.

Once we have fabricate, gold becomes incredibly easy to get. Any tool prof can be used to make some money, the ones that come to mind are weavers and smith tools, but tinkers can work as well. Fabricate something huge that’d usually take a lot of labor over 10 minutes and sell it. Linen can be made into a 10x10x10 sheet and sold for some obscene amount of gold, armor can be 1500 a piece, both leave us with more gold than we can carry over a few days.

A quick aside, economics still exist here, the party has to find someone willing to buy these products and they likely don’t have enough for 10x10x10ft of linen all at once

A note on “Raw Materials”

Fabricate specifies you must use raw materials, so what are raw materials?

“the basic material from which a product is made.”

So, anything used to make something can be said to be raw materials. Also, everything is eventually made of raw materials, so any object is fair game.

The Fabribook

Basically, we don’t need to spend agonizing amounts of downtime rewriting our spells. Or any spells, ever again. Fabricate a spellbook, we can make them normally as a wizard, and with enough ink we can make a book with every spell in the game inside it, and this is not limited to just wizard spells, though this wouldn’t allow us to cast non-wizard spells, it does give us every spell in a convenient place. Ink shouldn’t be an issue as it can be bought, and we have tons of gold after our linen exploits.

Cast fabricate 1000 times or so and hide books in various hiding places like demiplanes, imprisoned enemies, alternate dimensions, or in another timeline, and put dramij’s instant summons on them and keep those sapphires somewhere safe but accessible [interestingly, keeping an index of sapphires in a leomunds private chest might be good here], and keep some in areas where you have clone jars. We now have instant on-demand spell books with every spell in the game available to us. Try to keep these out of enemy hands as much as possible. One way of ensuring this is making a glyph that’ll blow the book up unless it’s removed via instant summons. Hide this set-up in a lead box so it’s harder to detect.

Permanent Conjuration Through Transmogrification

We can make non-permanent conjured items permanent by fabricating those objects into themselves, making them a separate but identical object. This draws on our definition of raw materials, as any object is made of the raw materials used to make it.

This works for things like the creation spell, which would normally only last for a set amount of time, to be indefinite. note that “Using any material created by this spell as another spell’s material component causes that spell to fail.” does not apply here, as the material is the target of the spell, and not the material component, and the material is not a magic item, so fabricate works on it.

Through Creation into Fabricate, we can make:
Catapult munitions
Vast quantities of every plant in the game
Vast quantities of poisons
Permanent gold statues worth small fortunes
any mundane object under 10ft
Ice troll corpses for ice troll hearts

If we speed up casting fabricate (through wish or chronurgists bead) or increase the duration of creation (extended spell), we can also make all the gems we’d ever need for material components for spells in one go by making a gem-encrusted statue. once these are fabricated, they’re no longer made by the spell creation, and work as components.

This also works for minor conjuration, we can save objects we’ve minor conjured for later by fabricating them into themselves, as long as we can nystul the object into being nonmagical before casting fabricate on them.

We can take a shadow blade of any spell level cast and size and fabricate it into itself, making it permanent without the need for concentration. Though I think this means we lose the ability to re-summon it as a bonus action, and we lose the trait that causes it to disappear upon being dropped, as we’re only left with the object ‘shadow blade’. Note this again requires nystuls, as it would count as a magical sword.

Force-Shaping

We can shape all spells that are constructs of force using fabricate, fabricate works on force as it’s not a magic item. This allows for some weird things to transpire

-Fabricate a wall of force, moving some out of the way, or using it to create objects, cover holes, or for use in vehicles.

-Fabricate a resilient sphere, making one permanent, and allowing you to move one off an object or creature.

The resilient spheres and walls of force could be used to make nigh-invincible buildings and vehicles while on the move, turning a carriage into a partially-visible tank. We can use resilient sphere to make our phantom steeds impervious to most outside harm at the cost of halving their speed

Finally, we can make unseen servants into unseen servants that last forever until they move outside of 60ft of us, as they are constructions of force and not creatures.

Interestingly this implies we can make enough unseen servants into a wall of force and a wall of force into unseen servants.

The above would only apply if unseen servants are objects, which is never stated or implied. a full article on force-shaping will be coming shortly

Conclusions

Fabricate is a more versatile spell than most seem to have realized thus far. with it we can project a ton of power through storing various conjured goods indefinitely and shaping force-constructions to our whims, as well as possibly get around the need for planar binding objects.