Erudite's Picatrix of Casting ★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Erudite's Picatrix of Casting is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 1 intermediate — Enchanted Gold Ink ×1 — which resolves to 3 distinct raw materials totalling 5 units, plus 8 crystals.

That bill outweighs 4,201 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 826 of the 1,591 Alchemist 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 6 Water Crystal and 2 Lightning Crystal.

Every step is Alchemist work, from a Lv 50 intermediate up to the Lv 50 finish, so one class covers the whole chain.

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

Of the intermediates, Enchanted Gold Ink has the widest use: 38 recipes call for it, spanning two of the eight crafting classes.