Balanced Darksteel Hook ★★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Balanced Darksteel Hook is 3 crafting steps deep and needs 2 intermediates — Darksteel Hook ×1 and Darksteel Nugget ×2 — which resolve to 2 distinct raw materials totalling 8 units, plus 50 crystals.

That bill outweighs 5,254 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 529 of the 1,932 Blacksmith ones, and 337 recipes nest deeper.

Only 23 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 27 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 23 Fire Shard, 21 Earth Shard and 6 Fire Crystal.

Every step is Blacksmith work, from a Lv 50 intermediate up to the Lv 50 finish, so one class covers the whole chain.

1 of the 2 raw materials come out of the ground, and one of them is time-gated: Darksteel Ore (1:00). That window comes round once per Eorzean day, every 70 real-world minutes.

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