Nightsteel Daggers ★★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Nightsteel Daggers is 4 crafting steps deep and needs 8 intermediates — Grade 3 Reisui of Dexterity ×3, Nightsteel Ingot ×2, Oroshigane Ingot ×2 and 5 others — which resolve to 17 distinct raw materials totalling 50 units, plus 36 crystals.

That bill outweighs 12,777 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 1,723 of the 1,932 Blacksmith ones, and 1 recipe nests deeper.

Only 4 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 32 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 14 Fire Crystal, 6 Earth Cluster, 4 Fire Cluster and 4 other kinds.

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

10 of the 17 raw materials come out of the ground, and 3 of them are time-gated: Gyr Abanian Spring Water (10:00, 22:00), Hingan Flax (2:00, 14:00) and 1 other. The widest gap between consecutive opening times is 4 Eorzean hours, about 12 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.