Wind-up Illuminatus ★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Wind-up Illuminatus is 3 crafting steps deep and needs 5 intermediates — Chimerical Felt ×1, Crawler Silk ×1, Titanium Ingot ×1 and 2 others — which resolve to 11 distinct raw materials totalling 26 units, plus 120 crystals.

That bill outweighs 9,543 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 1,273 of the 1,968 Weaver ones, and 337 recipes nest deeper.

Only 99 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 21 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 99 Lightning Shard, 10 Lightning Crystal, 9 Fire Crystal and 1 other kind.

The chain crosses three disciplines — Weaver to Lv 60, Blacksmith to Lv 56 and Alchemist to Lv 25 — so no single class can finish it unaided.

7 of the 11 raw materials come out of the ground, and one of them is time-gated: Silkworm Cocoon (1:00). That window comes round once per Eorzean day, every 70 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Crawler Silk has the widest use: 178 recipes call for it, spanning five of the eight crafting classes.