Grade 1 Wheel of Observation ★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Grade 1 Wheel of Observation is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 2 intermediates — Enchanted Gold Ink ×1 and Silver Ingot ×1 — which resolve to 5 distinct raw materials totaling 9 units, plus 7 crystals.

That bill outweighs 5,492 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 1,090 of the 1,591 Alchemist ones, and 4,464 recipes nest deeper.

Only 2 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 5 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 3 Water Crystal, 2 Wind Shard, 1 Lightning Cluster and 1 other kind.

The chain crosses two disciplines — Alchemist to Lv 50 and Goldsmith to Lv 23 — so no single class can finish it unaided.

3 of the 5 raw materials come out of the ground, and 2 of them are time-gated: Unaspected Crystal (1:00, 2:00, 3:00, 4:00, 5:00, 6:00, 7:00, 8:00, 9:00, 10:00, 13:00, 17:00, 18:00, 19:00, 21:00) and Gold Sand (5:00). The widest gap between consecutive opening times is 4 Eorzean hours, about 12 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Silver Ingot has the widest use: 157 recipes call for it, spanning eight of the eight crafting classes.