Been using Houdini for a little bit now, still getting my head around things. Learnt about simulating rigid body effects with spheres and transforming the original mesh back on top, and its going fairly well. Issue is now, once I start adding a big mass to the end of a chain, no matter the sub-steps, no matter the density of spheres, the ball ends up either clipping through or the chain clips and breaks apart, like shown:

https://streamable.com/hljtu [streamable.com]

My end goal is to have a wrecking ball swoop in, and have the wrecking ball object fracture and break apart once it hits an static object (hence the inverted wrecking ball). I'm confident with just the chain, just the added mass is breaking the entire thing and I don't know how to fix it.

Is this the correct work flow? Or should I use something else to achieve the effect?

I've included the hip file so you can see how I've built the wrecking ball and such.