Bronze Pliers

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Bronze Pliers is 3 crafting steps deep and needs 3 intermediates — Bronze Ingot ×2, Bronze Rivets ×1 and Clove Oil ×1 — which resolve to 3 distinct raw materials totaling 8 units, plus 6 crystals.

That bill outweighs 5,254 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 529 of the 1,932 Blacksmith ones, and 337 recipes nest deeper.

Only 2 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 4 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 4 Fire Shard, 1 Earth Shard and 1 Water Shard.

The chain crosses two disciplines — Blacksmith to Lv 10 and Alchemist to Lv 14 — so no single class can finish it unaided.

One intermediate outranks the result: Clove Oil is a Lv 14 Alchemist recipe feeding a Lv 10 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.