Armorcraft Forge ★★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Armorcraft Forge is 3 crafting steps deep and needs 4 intermediates — Cut Stone ×4, Mortar ×2, Wolfram Ingot ×1 and 1 other — which resolve to 10 distinct raw materials totalling 31 units, plus 22 crystals.

That bill outweighs 10,578 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 1,713 of the 2,216 Goldsmith ones, and 337 recipes nest deeper.

Only 3 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 19 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 12 Wind Shard, 4 Water Shard, 3 Fire Cluster and 2 other kinds.

The chain crosses three disciplines — Goldsmith to Lv 50, Blacksmith to Lv 50 and Alchemist to Lv 20 — so no single class can finish it unaided.

7 of the 10 raw materials come out of the ground, and one of them is time-gated: Ferberite (3:00). That window comes round once per Eorzean day, every 70 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Mortar has the widest use: 140 recipes call for it, spanning six of the eight crafting classes.