Militia File ★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Militia File is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 2 intermediates — Darksteel Nugget ×2 and Hippogryph Leather ×1 — which resolve to 3 distinct raw materials totalling 8 units, plus 14 crystals.

That bill outweighs 5,254 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 529 of the 1,932 Blacksmith ones, and 4,464 recipes nest deeper.

Only 5 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 9 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 9 Fire Crystal and 5 Earth Crystal.

The chain crosses two disciplines — Blacksmith to Lv 50 and Leatherworker to Lv 50 — so no single class can finish it unaided.

2 of the 3 raw materials come out of the ground, and one of them is time-gated: Darksteel Ore (1:00). That window comes round once per Eorzean day, every 70 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Hippogryph Leather has the widest use: 131 recipes call for it, spanning seven of the eight crafting classes.