Drachen Armor Augmentation ★★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Drachen Armor Augmentation is 3 crafting steps deep and needs 7 intermediates — Ancient Lumber ×1, Darksteel Ingot ×1, Terminus Putty ×1 and 4 others — which resolve to 11 distinct raw materials totalling 39 units, plus 35 crystals.

That bill outweighs 11,756 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 1,459 of the 1,591 Alchemist ones, and 337 recipes nest deeper.

Only 12 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 23 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 7 Water Crystal, 6 Fire Crystal, 6 Wind Crystal and 7 other kinds.

The chain crosses four disciplines — Alchemist to Lv 50, Armorer to Lv 50, Blacksmith to Lv 50 and Carpenter to Lv 50 — so no single class can finish it unaided.

5 of the 11 raw materials come out of the ground, and 4 of them are time-gated: Darksteel Ore (1:00), Ferberite (3:00) and 2 others. The widest gap between consecutive opening times is 16 Eorzean hours, about 47 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Darksteel Nugget has the widest use: 121 recipes call for it, spanning seven of the eight crafting classes.