Bronze Buckler

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Bronze Buckler is 3 crafting steps deep and needs 4 intermediates — Bronze Plate ×1, Iron Rivets ×1, Bronze Ingot ×3 and 1 other — which resolve to 3 distinct raw materials totaling 12 units, plus 8 crystals.

That bill outweighs 6,221 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 580 of the 1,441 Armorer ones, and 337 recipes nest deeper.

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

The chain crosses two disciplines — Armorer to Lv 15 and Blacksmith to Lv 18 — so no single class can finish it unaided.

One intermediate outranks the result: Iron Rivets is a Lv 18 Blacksmith recipe feeding a Lv 15 craft, so that step, not the last one, is the real gate.

All 3 raw materials are gathered, and not one of their spots is timed, so nothing in the tree waits on the Eorzean clock.