Artisan's Pliers ★★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Artisan's Pliers is 3 crafting steps deep and needs 4 intermediates — Darksteel Ingot ×1, Shark Oil ×1, Wolfram Ingot ×1 and 1 other — which resolve to 8 distinct raw materials totalling 26 units, plus 18 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 15 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 6 Fire Crystal, 5 Fire Cluster, 5 Water Shard and 1 other kind.

The chain crosses two disciplines — Blacksmith to Lv 50 and Alchemist to Lv 41 — so no single class can finish it unaided.

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