Spruce Round Shield ★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Spruce Round Shield is 3 crafting steps deep and needs 4 intermediates — Darksteel Rivets ×2, Treated Spruce Lumber ×1, Darksteel Nugget ×3 and 1 other — which resolve to 3 distinct raw materials totalling 24 units, plus 24 crystals.

That bill outweighs 8,926 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 904 of the 1,552 Carpenter ones, and 337 recipes nest deeper.

Only 2 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 22 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 15 Fire Crystal, 6 Wind Crystal, 2 Wind Cluster and 1 other kind.

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

2 of the 3 raw materials come out of the ground, and 2 of them are time-gated: Darksteel Ore (1:00) and Spruce Log (9:00). The widest gap between consecutive opening times is 16 Eorzean hours, about 47 real-world minutes.

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