Palladium Earring of Fending ★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Palladium Earring of Fending is 3 crafting steps deep and needs 5 intermediates — Palladium Ingot ×2, Grade 2 Reisui of Vitality ×1, Star Spinel ×1 and 2 others — which resolve to 12 distinct raw materials totalling 37 units, plus 33 crystals.

That bill outweighs 11,564 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 1,852 of the 2,216 Goldsmith ones, and 337 recipes nest deeper.

Only 4 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 29 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 17 Wind Crystal, 6 Fire Cluster, 6 Wind Cluster and 2 other kinds.

The chain crosses two disciplines — Goldsmith to Lv 70 and Alchemist to Lv 70 — so no single class can finish it unaided.

9 of the 12 raw materials come out of the ground, and 4 of them are time-gated: Hallowed Basil (6:00, 18:00), Palladium Ore (4:00, 16:00) and 2 others. The widest gap between consecutive opening times is 6 Eorzean hours, about 18 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Palladium Nugget has the widest use: 129 recipes call for it, spanning seven of the eight crafting classes.