Light Steel Subligar ★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Light Steel Subligar is 3 crafting steps deep and needs 3 intermediates — Darksteel Ingot ×1, Hippogryph Leather ×1 and Darksteel Nugget ×2 — which resolve to 5 distinct raw materials totalling 18 units, plus 12 crystals.

That bill outweighs 7,380 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 694 of the 1,441 Armorer ones, and 337 recipes nest deeper.

Only 2 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 10 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 6 Fire Crystal, 3 Earth Crystal, 1 Earth Cluster and 2 other kinds.

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

2 of the 5 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.