Star Ruby

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Star Ruby is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 1 intermediate — Basilisk Whetstone ×1 — which resolves to 2 distinct raw materials totalling 4 units, plus 9 crystals.

That bill outweighs 3,935 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 504 of the 2,216 Goldsmith ones, and 4,464 recipes nest deeper.

Only 4 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 5 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 5 Wind Shard and 4 Wind Crystal.

Every step is Goldsmith work, from a Lv 40 intermediate up to the Lv 55 finish, so one class covers the whole chain.

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

Star Ruby is itself consumed by 50 further recipes, spanning seven of the eight crafting classes.