Nightsteel Shield ★★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Nightsteel Shield is 4 crafting steps deep and needs 5 intermediates — Nightsteel Ingot ×2, Grade 3 Reisui of Vitality ×1, Rhodonite ×1 and 2 others — which resolve to 12 distinct raw materials totalling 25 units, plus 24 crystals.

That bill outweighs 9,313 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 922 of the 1,441 Armorer 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 4 other kinds.

The chain crosses four disciplines — Armorer to Lv 70, Alchemist to Lv 70, Blacksmith 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.