Steel Alembic

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Steel Alembic is 3 crafting steps deep and needs 3 intermediates — Steel Plate ×1, Steel Rivets ×1 and Steel Ingot ×3 — which resolve to 2 distinct raw materials totalling 9 units, plus 17 crystals.

That bill outweighs 5,492 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 519 of the 1,441 Armorer ones, and 337 recipes nest deeper.

Only 5 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 12 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 9 Fire Shard, 6 Ice Shard and 2 Earth Shard.

The chain crosses two disciplines — Armorer to Lv 29 and Blacksmith to Lv 29 — so no single class can finish it unaided.

Both raw materials are gathered, and no spot for either is timed, so nothing in the tree waits on the Eorzean clock.

Of the intermediates, Steel Ingot has the widest use: 125 recipes call for it, spanning seven of the eight crafting classes.