Platinum Scarf of Fending ★★★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Platinum Scarf of Fending is 3 crafting steps deep and needs 4 intermediates — Platinum Ingot ×3, Cashmere Cloth ×1, Diamond ×1 and 1 other — which resolve to 9 distinct raw materials totalling 54 units, plus 23 crystals.

That bill outweighs 12,945 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 2,094 of the 2,216 Goldsmith ones, and 337 recipes nest deeper.

Only 4 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 19 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 11 Wind Cluster, 9 Fire Cluster, 2 Lightning Cluster and 1 other kind.

The chain crosses three disciplines — Goldsmith to Lv 50, Alchemist to Lv 50 and Weaver to Lv 50 — so no single class can finish it unaided.

2 of the 9 raw materials come out of the ground, and 2 of them are time-gated: Platinum Ore (4:00) and Raw Diamond (4:00). That window comes round once per Eorzean day, every 70 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Platinum Ingot has the widest use: 176 recipes call for it, spanning seven of the eight crafting classes.