Brass Alembic

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Brass Alembic is 4 crafting steps deep and needs 6 intermediates — Amateur's Alembic ×1, Brass Ingot ×1, Bronze Rivets ×2 and 3 others — which resolve to 3 distinct raw materials totalling 18 units, plus 13 crystals.

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

Only 2 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 11 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 6 Fire Shard, 3 Ice Shard, 2 Earth Shard and 1 other kind.

The chain crosses three disciplines — Armorer to Lv 15, Goldsmith to Lv 14 and Blacksmith to Lv 3 — so no single class can finish it unaided.

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

Of the intermediates, Brass Ingot has the widest use: 94 recipes call for it, spanning seven of the eight crafting classes.