Perfect Vellum ★★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Perfect Vellum is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 1 intermediate — Shark Oil ×1 — which resolves to 4 distinct raw materials totalling 5 units, plus 8 crystals.

That bill outweighs 4,201 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 489 of the 1,844 Leatherworker ones, and 4,464 recipes nest deeper.

Only 3 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 5 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 5 Water Shard, 2 Earth Cluster and 1 Wind Cluster.

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

3 of the 4 raw materials come out of the ground, and one of them is time-gated: Pumice (1:00). That window comes round once per Eorzean day, every 70 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Shark Oil has the widest use: 24 recipes call for it, spanning five of the eight crafting classes.