Nightsteel Sword ★★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Nightsteel Sword is 4 crafting steps deep and needs 5 intermediates — Grade 3 Reisui of Vitality ×2, Nightsteel Ingot ×2, Rhodonite ×1 and 2 others — which resolve to 12 distinct raw materials totalling 26 units, plus 24 crystals.

That bill outweighs 9,543 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 1,087 of the 1,932 Blacksmith ones, and 1 recipe nests deeper.

Only 4 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 20 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 6 Fire Crystal, 6 Wind Crystal, 4 Earth Cluster and 3 other kinds.

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

8 of the 12 raw materials come out of the ground, and 3 of them are time-gated: Gyr Abanian Spring Water (10:00, 22:00), Nightsteel Ore (6:00, 18:00) and 1 other. The widest gap between consecutive opening times is 8 Eorzean hours, about 23 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, High Steel Nugget has the widest use: 133 recipes call for it, spanning seven of the eight crafting classes.