How many items can you make with Fabricate?

Question

I have always been under the impression that fabricate was only ever able to make one item, out of one or more different materials.

Although the spell says:

You convert raw materials into products of the same material.

I read this as a general description of how the spell works, so you know you could make multiple different products from different castings.

Further, all the examples given are single items, even when clothes, which I assumed would only count as plurale tantum, as they come in a set, and not multiple sets?

The rest of the spell description implies (to me at least) only a single object is created:

You can fabricate a Large or smaller object.

How many objects can you create out of this spell?

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Inspired by this question, which suggests it would be possible to make multiple burgers and/or sausages from a single horse, and not just a 5ft³ block of mince meat.

Answer 1

You can probably make more than one object with a single casting.

You've identified one phrase in the spell description that seems to indicate the possibility of creating many objects, but there is another:

For example, you can fabricate a wooden bridge from a clump of trees, a rope from a patch of hemp, and clothes from flax or wool.

The bridge example is important, as it likely does not qualify as a single object according to the rules for objects:

For the purpose of these rules, an object is a discrete, inanimate item like a window, door, sword, book, table, chair, or stone, not a building or a vehicle that is composed of many other objects.

It seems reasonable to rule that a bridge is a type of building, a composition of many other objects, rather than a single discrete object, so creating a bridge requires the creation of many objects.

Additionally, "clothes" is offered as an example, and it seems quite natural to interpret this to potentially refer to a multi-garment outfit rather than only to a singular one piece jump suit.

So what of the phrase "You can fabricate a Large or smaller object"? It is perfectly consistent to understand this phrase as an allowance, rather than a restriction. This statement is just explaining that you may create an object if you have enough of the requisite material to create it, not declaring that you may only create one object per casting.