Nightsteel Mail of Maiming ★★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Nightsteel Mail of Maiming is 4 crafting steps deep and needs 9 intermediates — Azurite ×2, Grade 3 Reisui of Strength ×2, Nightsteel Ingot ×2 and 6 others — which resolve to 19 distinct raw materials totalling 51 units, plus 44 crystals.

That bill outweighs 12,830 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 1,355 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 10 Wind Crystal, 6 Fire Crystal, 5 Earth Crystal and 8 other kinds.

The chain crosses six disciplines — Armorer to Lv 70, Alchemist to Lv 70, Blacksmith to Lv 70, Weaver to Lv 70, Goldsmith to Lv 66 and Leatherworker to Lv 66 — so no single class can finish it unaided.

13 of the 19 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.