Adamantite Pauldroncoat of Fending ★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Adamantite Pauldroncoat of Fending is 3 crafting steps deep and needs 5 intermediates — Adamantite Ingot ×3, Aurum Regis Nugget ×2, Grade 2 Vitality Dissolvent ×2 and 2 others — which resolve to 15 distinct raw materials totalling 48 units, plus 36 crystals.

That bill outweighs 12,691 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 1,340 of the 1,441 Armorer ones, and 337 recipes nest deeper.

Only 4 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 32 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 10 Fire Crystal, 10 Wind Crystal, 6 Earth Cluster and 5 other kinds.

The chain crosses five disciplines — Armorer to Lv 60, Alchemist to Lv 60, Blacksmith to Lv 60, Leatherworker to Lv 60 and Goldsmith to Lv 58 — so no single class can finish it unaided.

9 of the 15 raw materials come out of the ground, and 8 of them are time-gated: Adamantite Ore (0:00, 2:00, 6:00, 10:00, 12:00, 14:00, 18:00, 22:00), Blue Quartz (6:00, 18:00) and 6 others. The widest gap between consecutive opening times is 3 Eorzean hours, about 9 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Aurum Regis Nugget has the widest use: 185 recipes call for it, spanning seven of the eight crafting classes.