Smithing Bench ★★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Smithing Bench is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 3 intermediates — Cobalt Ingot ×4, Darksteel Nugget ×4 and Wolfram Ingot ×1 — which resolve to 7 distinct raw materials totalling 29 units, plus 38 crystals.

That bill outweighs 10,170 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 1,176 of the 1,932 Blacksmith ones, and 4,464 recipes nest deeper.

Only 3 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 35 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 20 Fire Shard, 12 Fire Crystal, 4 Fire Cluster and 1 other kind.

Every step is Blacksmith work, from a Lv 42 intermediate up to the Lv 50 finish, so one class covers the whole chain.

4 of the 7 raw materials come out of the ground, and 2 of them are time-gated: Darksteel Ore (1:00) and Ferberite (3:00). The widest gap between consecutive opening times is 22 Eorzean hours, about 64 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Cobalt Ingot has the widest use: 145 recipes call for it, spanning seven of the eight crafting classes.