Ala Mhigan Alembic ★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Ala Mhigan Alembic is 3 crafting steps deep and needs 4 intermediates — Snailfish Oil ×3, Chromite Ingot ×1, Palladium Nugget ×1 and 1 other — which resolve to 12 distinct raw materials totalling 35 units, plus 30 crystals.

That bill outweighs 11,223 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 1,179 of the 1,441 Armorer 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 — Armorer to Lv 70, Alchemist to Lv 70, Blacksmith to Lv 70 and Goldsmith to Lv 68 — so no single class can finish it unaided.

5 of the 12 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, Palladium Nugget has the widest use: 129 recipes call for it, spanning seven of the eight crafting classes.