Book of Aurum Regis

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Book of Aurum Regis is 3 crafting steps deep and needs 6 intermediates — Aurum Regis Nugget ×2, Star Ruby ×2, Enchanted Aurum Regis Ink ×1 and 3 others — which resolve to 9 distinct raw materials totalling 37 units, plus 52 crystals.

That bill outweighs 11,564 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 1,452 of the 1,591 Alchemist ones, and 337 recipes nest deeper.

Only 10 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 42 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 27 Wind Crystal, 10 Water Crystal, 10 Wind Shard and 1 other kind.

The chain crosses two disciplines — Alchemist to Lv 58 and Goldsmith to Lv 58 — so no single class can finish it unaided.

8 of the 9 raw materials come out of the ground, and one of them is time-gated: Gold Ore (9:00). That window comes round once per Eorzean day, every 70 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Aurum Regis Nugget has the widest use: 185 recipes call for it, spanning seven of the eight crafting classes.