Madman's Whispering Rod ★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Madman's Whispering Rod is 3 crafting steps deep and needs 2 intermediates — Growth Formula Delta ×1 and Quicksilver ×1 — which resolve to 5 distinct raw materials totalling 6 units, plus 9 crystals.

That bill outweighs 4,542 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 917 of the 1,591 Alchemist ones, and 337 recipes nest deeper.

Only 5 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 4 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 6 Water Crystal, 2 Lightning Crystal and 1 Water Shard.

Every step is Alchemist work, from a Lv 1 intermediate up to the Lv 50 finish, so one class covers the whole chain.

All 5 raw materials are gathered, and 3 of them are time-gated: Thavnairian Mistletoe (17:00), Trillium Bulb (21:00) and 1 other. The widest gap between consecutive opening times is 16 Eorzean hours, about 47 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Quicksilver has the widest use: 22 recipes call for it, spanning two of the eight crafting classes.