Expanse Barding ★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Expanse Barding is 4 crafting steps deep and needs 8 intermediates — Titanium Ingot ×4, Hallowed Ramie Cloth ×2, Aurum Regis Nugget ×1 and 5 others — which resolve to 11 distinct raw materials totalling 71 units, plus 74 crystals.

That bill outweighs 13,309 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 1,406 of the 1,441 Armorer ones, and 1 recipe nests deeper.

Only 3 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 71 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 36 Fire Crystal, 18 Lightning Crystal, 10 Water Crystal and 4 other kinds.

The chain crosses five disciplines — Armorer to Lv 60, Goldsmith to Lv 58, Alchemist to Lv 56, Blacksmith to Lv 56 and Weaver to Lv 56 — so no single class can finish it unaided.

10 of the 11 raw materials come out of the ground, and 2 of them are time-gated: Abalathian Mistletoe (6:00, 18:00) and Gold Ore (9:00). The widest gap between consecutive opening times is 12 Eorzean hours, about 35 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.