Artisan's File ★★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Artisan's File is 3 crafting steps deep and needs 4 intermediates — Darksteel Ingot ×1, Hippogryph Leather ×1, Wolfram Ingot ×1 and 1 other — which resolve to 8 distinct raw materials totalling 26 units, plus 16 crystals.

That bill outweighs 9,543 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 1,087 of the 1,932 Blacksmith ones, and 337 recipes nest deeper.

Only 3 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 13 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 6 Fire Crystal, 5 Fire Cluster, 3 Earth Crystal and 1 other kind.

The chain crosses two disciplines — Blacksmith to Lv 50 and Leatherworker to Lv 50 — so no single class can finish it unaided.

4 of the 8 raw materials come out of the ground, and 2 of them are time-gated: Darksteel Ore (1:00) and Ferberite (3:00). The widest gap between consecutive opening times is 22 Eorzean hours, about 64 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Hippogryph Leather has the widest use: 131 recipes call for it, spanning seven of the eight crafting classes.