Ala Mhigan Needle ★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Ala Mhigan Needle is 3 crafting steps deep and needs 4 intermediates — Snailfish Oil ×3, Chromite Ingot ×1, Zelkova Lumber ×1 and 1 other — which resolve to 11 distinct raw materials totalling 34 units, plus 30 crystals.

That bill outweighs 11,052 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 1,771 of the 2,216 Goldsmith ones, and 337 recipes nest deeper.

Only 4 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 26 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 6 Lightning Cluster, 6 Water Cluster, 5 Fire Crystal and 4 other kinds.

The chain crosses four disciplines — Goldsmith to Lv 70, Alchemist to Lv 70, Blacksmith to Lv 70 and Carpenter to Lv 68 — so no single class can finish it unaided.

4 of the 11 raw materials come out of the ground, and one of them is time-gated: Chromite Ore (10:00, 22:00). The widest gap between consecutive opening times is 12 Eorzean hours, about 35 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Chromite Ingot has the widest use: 121 recipes call for it, spanning six of the eight crafting classes.