Heavy Darksteel Flanchard ★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Heavy Darksteel Flanchard is 4 crafting steps deep and needs 8 intermediates — Darksteel Couters ×1, Darksteel Plate ×1, Darksteel Rings ×1 and 5 others — which resolve to 5 distinct raw materials totalling 37 units, plus 43 crystals.

That bill outweighs 11,564 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 1,233 of the 1,441 Armorer ones, and 1 recipe nests deeper.

Only 2 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 41 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 27 Fire Crystal, 6 Ice Crystal, 3 Wind Crystal and 4 other kinds.

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

4 of the 5 raw materials come out of the ground, and 2 of them are time-gated: Darksteel Ore (1:00) and Gold Ore (9:00). The widest gap between consecutive opening times is 16 Eorzean hours, about 47 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Rose Gold Nugget has the widest use: 179 recipes call for it, spanning seven of the eight crafting classes.