Decorated Buckler

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Decorated Buckler is 4 crafting steps deep and needs 6 intermediates — Bronze Buckler ×1, Silver Ingot ×1, Iron Rivets ×2 and 3 others — which resolve to 4 distinct raw materials totalling 18 units, plus 19 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 7 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 12 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 7 Fire Shard, 6 Ice Shard, 4 Earth Shard and 1 other kind.

The chain crosses three disciplines — Armorer to Lv 33, Goldsmith to Lv 23 and Blacksmith to Lv 18 — so no single class can finish it unaided.

All 4 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, Silver Ingot has the widest use: 157 recipes call for it, spanning eight of the eight crafting classes.