Imperial Operative Tricorne ★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Imperial Operative Tricorne is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 2 intermediates — Hippogryph Leather ×1 and Rose Gold Nugget ×1 — which resolve to 5 distinct raw materials totalling 7 units, plus 11 crystals.

That bill outweighs 4,963 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 598 of the 1,844 Leatherworker ones, and 4,464 recipes nest deeper.

Only 5 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 6 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 6 Earth Crystal and 5 Wind Crystal.

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

3 of the 5 raw materials come out of the ground, and one of them is time-gated: Gold Ore (9:00). That window comes round once per Eorzean day, every 70 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.