Heart of the Vortex ★★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Heart of the Vortex is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 2 intermediates — Gold Ingot ×3 and Jadeite ×1 — which resolve to 7 distinct raw materials totalling 24 units, plus 26 crystals.

That bill outweighs 8,926 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 1,346 of the 2,216 Goldsmith ones, and 4,464 recipes nest deeper.

Only 12 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 14 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 12 Wind Crystal, 6 Wind Cluster, 5 Wind Shard and 1 other kind.

Every step is Goldsmith work, from a Lv 40 intermediate up to the Lv 50 finish, so one class covers the whole chain.

3 of the 7 raw materials come out of the ground, and 2 of them are time-gated: Gold Ore (9:00) and Native Gold (4:00). The widest gap between consecutive opening times is 19 Eorzean hours, about 55 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Gold Ingot has the widest use: 184 recipes call for it, spanning seven of the eight crafting classes.