Wrapped Steel Culinary Knife

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Wrapped Steel Culinary Knife is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 3 intermediates — Oak Lumber ×1, Siltstone Whetstone ×1 and Steel Ingot ×1 — which resolve to 4 distinct raw materials totalling 8 units, plus 15 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 7 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 8 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 6 Fire Shard, 6 Wind Shard and 3 Earth Shard.

The chain crosses three disciplines — Blacksmith to Lv 35, Carpenter to Lv 32 and Goldsmith to Lv 30 — so no single class can finish it unaided.

All 4 raw materials are gathered, and not one of their spots is timed, so nothing in the tree waits on the Eorzean clock.

Of the intermediates, Steel Ingot has the widest use: 125 recipes call for it, spanning seven of the eight crafting classes.