Spine of the Vortex ★★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Spine of the Vortex is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 2 intermediates — Ancient Lumber ×3 and Electrum Ingot ×1 — which resolve to 6 distinct raw materials totalling 24 units, plus 26 crystals.

That bill outweighs 8,926 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 904 of the 1,552 Carpenter ones, and 4,464 recipes nest deeper.

Only 12 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 14 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 12 Wind Crystal, 6 Wind Cluster, 5 Wind Shard and 1 other kind.

The chain crosses two disciplines — Carpenter to Lv 50 and Goldsmith to Lv 42 — so no single class can finish it unaided.

2 of the 6 raw materials come out of the ground, and one of them is time-gated: Scarlet Sap (3:00). That window comes round once per Eorzean day, every 70 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Electrum Ingot has the widest use: 234 recipes call for it, spanning seven of the eight crafting classes.