Sanguine Scepter ★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Sanguine Scepter is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 1 intermediate — Darksteel Nugget ×1 — which resolves to 2 distinct raw materials totalling 4 units, plus 8 crystals.

That bill outweighs 3,935 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 504 of the 2,216 Goldsmith ones, and 4,464 recipes nest deeper.

Only 5 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 3 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 5 Fire Crystal and 3 Wind Crystal.

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

1 of the 2 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, Darksteel Nugget has the widest use: 121 recipes call for it, spanning seven of the eight crafting classes.