Militia Caligae ★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Militia Caligae is 3 crafting steps deep and needs 3 intermediates — Darksteel Rivets ×1, Hippogryph Leather ×1 and Darksteel Nugget ×1 — which resolve to 4 distinct raw materials totalling 6 units, plus 14 crystals.

That bill outweighs 4,542 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 537 of the 1,844 Leatherworker ones, and 337 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 6 Earth Crystal, 6 Fire Crystal and 2 Wind Crystal.

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

2 of the 4 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.