Darksteel Plate ★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Darksteel Plate is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 1 intermediate — Darksteel Nugget ×2 — which resolves to 1 distinct raw material totalling 6 units, plus 9 crystals.

That bill outweighs 4,542 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 466 of the 1,441 Armorer ones, and 4,464 recipes nest deeper.

Only 3 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 6 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 6 Fire Crystal and 3 Ice Crystal.

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

The single raw material is gathered, and it is time-gated: Darksteel Ore (1:00). That window comes round once per Eorzean day, every 70 real-world minutes.

Darksteel Plate is itself consumed by 33 further recipes, spanning four of the eight crafting classes.