Nightsteel Sabatons of Fending ★★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Nightsteel Sabatons of Fending is 4 crafting steps deep and needs 7 intermediates — Nightsteel Ingot ×3, Grade 3 Reisui of Vitality ×1, Marid Leather ×1 and 4 others — which resolve to 15 distinct raw materials totalling 50 units, plus 44 crystals.

That bill outweighs 12,777 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 1,350 of the 1,441 Armorer ones, and 1 recipe nests deeper.

Only 4 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 40 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 12 Fire Crystal, 6 Earth Cluster, 6 Wind 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 Leatherworker to Lv 66 — so no single class can finish it unaided.

10 of the 15 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.