Conical Alembic

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Conical Alembic is 4 crafting steps deep and needs 5 intermediates — Brass Ingot ×1, Iron Alembic ×1, Iron Rivets ×2 and 2 others — which resolve to 3 distinct raw materials totalling 15 units, plus 15 crystals.

That bill outweighs 6,735 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 616 of the 1,441 Armorer ones, and 1 recipe nests deeper.

Only 4 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, 5 Ice Shard, 3 Earth Shard and 1 other kind.

The chain crosses three disciplines — Armorer to Lv 26, Blacksmith to Lv 18 and Goldsmith to Lv 14 — 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, Iron Ingot has the widest use: 113 recipes call for it, spanning seven of the eight crafting classes.