Fabricators (or fabs) turn digital designs into three-dimensional objects by layering materials such as plastic, metal, biological matter, or composites. They vary in size, scale, and precision, and are used to produce a range of physical consumer and industrial goods such as electronics, housing, medical tissues and devices, vehicles, clothing, and food.

Simple consumer good fabricators for producing replacement parts for appliances, clothing, hobby activities, and tools are commonly found in private residences. These can be used without registered monitoring, unlike food biofabs which are as a consequence much more rarely individually owned. More complex goods, electronics, medical, and bulk food production are almost all produced and monitored in more efficient centralised locations by larger industrial fabs and delivered by drone.

The Chandler-Kapoor Agreements of the 70s require all signatories to monitor for unauthorized fabrication. Many existential risk charities have funded additional regional rollouts of denser distributions of motes in under-served areas to mitigate the danger of missing any fabrication. The creation of what have been called Viroforges, hacked printers able to produce pathogenic agents, is enough of a concern that many polities have funded worldwide networks such as Phaethon tuned for detecting unknown pathogens. There is little monitoring off Earth, and Deus Machina claims that the dispersal of humanity while technology such as fabricators are unsupervised by synth is a great filter explanation and the largest threat to humanity.