Staggered Shelf ★★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Staggered Shelf is 3 crafting steps deep and needs 4 intermediates — Ancient Lumber ×5, Varnish ×3, Wolfram Ingot ×1 and 1 other — which resolve to 9 distinct raw materials totalling 31 units, plus 45 crystals.

That bill outweighs 10,578 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 1,086 of the 1,552 Carpenter ones, and 337 recipes nest deeper.

Only 3 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 42 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 24 Water Shard, 12 Wind Cluster, 6 Ice Cluster and 2 other kinds.

The chain crosses three disciplines — Carpenter to Lv 50, Blacksmith to Lv 50 and Alchemist to Lv 41 — so no single class can finish it unaided.

5 of the 9 raw materials come out of the ground, and 2 of them are time-gated: Ferberite (3:00) and Scarlet Sap (3:00). That window comes round once per Eorzean day, every 70 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Varnish has the widest use: 114 recipes call for it, spanning four of the eight crafting classes.