Cauldronmaster's Alembic ★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Cauldronmaster's Alembic is 3 crafting steps deep and needs 8 intermediates — Adamantite Ingot ×2, Aurum Regis Ingot ×2, Crystal Glass ×1 and 5 others — which resolve to 19 distinct raw materials totalling 53 units, plus 43 crystals.

That bill outweighs 12,925 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 1,371 of the 1,441 Armorer ones, and 337 recipes nest deeper.

Only 4 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 39 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 14 Wind Crystal, 10 Fire Crystal, 5 Water Crystal and 5 other kinds.

The chain crosses four disciplines — Armorer to Lv 60, Blacksmith to Lv 60, Goldsmith to Lv 60 and Alchemist to Lv 50 — so no single class can finish it unaided.

14 of the 19 raw materials come out of the ground, and 7 of them are time-gated: Adamantite Ore (0:00, 2:00, 6:00, 10:00, 12:00, 14:00, 18:00, 22:00), Aurum Regis Ore (2:00, 14:00) and 5 others. The widest gap between consecutive opening times is 4 Eorzean hours, about 12 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.