Nightsteel Armor of Fending ★★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Nightsteel Armor of Fending is 4 crafting steps deep and needs 8 intermediates — Nightsteel Ingot ×3, Grade 3 Reisui of Vitality ×2, Rhodonite ×2 and 5 others — which resolve to 16 distinct raw materials totalling 62 units, plus 51 crystals.

That bill outweighs 13,194 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 1,399 of the 1,441 Armorer ones, and 1 recipe nests deeper.

Only 4 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 47 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 12 Fire Crystal, 12 Wind Crystal, 7 Lightning Crystal and 6 other kinds.

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

11 of the 16 raw materials come out of the ground, and 4 of them are time-gated: Gyr Abanian Spring Water (10:00, 22:00), Hingan Flax (2:00, 14:00) and 2 others. 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.