Inferno Rod ★★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Inferno Rod is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 2 intermediates — Ruby ×3 and Mythril Ingot ×2 — which resolve to 6 distinct raw materials totalling 26 units, plus 29 crystals.

That bill outweighs 9,543 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 1,562 of the 2,216 Goldsmith ones, and 4,464 recipes nest deeper.

Only 12 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 17 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 12 Fire Crystal, 8 Fire Shard, 6 Wind Cluster and 1 other kind.

The chain crosses two disciplines — Goldsmith to Lv 50 and Blacksmith to Lv 38 — so no single class can finish it unaided.

2 of the 6 raw materials come out of the ground, and one of them is time-gated: Raw Ruby (18:00). That window comes round once per Eorzean day, every 70 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Mythril Ingot has the widest use: 135 recipes call for it, spanning seven of the eight crafting classes.