I can't really give you any advice on the social decay. That might be a NAP induced behavior so you might want to take a look at what NAPs are active in the zone in which you are playing.
On the fabricator: All I can really say is that is what happens with low fabrication skill. Once you get the skill up, it gets much better and you don't get very many dye explosions, fights with the machine and break downs. But at first, with no fabrication skill, it can be a trial as it does one of those three things about every third attempt or so using the machine. Once you get up to higher skill levels is when you can actually do things.
Hope this helps.
@CGrant56
That's only partially true. How often the sims "fight" with the fabricator does go down as fabrication skill goes up.
But how often the fabricator breaks down is fixed. It's configured like clockwork in the tuning files, it's health has exactly a 20% decrease with EVERY use. It will always break every 5th use.
<U n="statistic_change">
<T n="advertise">False</T>
<T n="amount">-0.2</T>
<T n="stat">16633<!--commodity_Object_Brokenness--></T>
I actually made a mod that decreases it to like 5% decrease with every use. So it doesn't break down all the darn time.
