Portable Stepladder ★★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Portable Stepladder is 3 crafting steps deep and needs 6 intermediates — Ancient Lumber ×3, Darksteel Nugget ×2, Varnish ×2 and 3 others — which resolve to 8 distinct raw materials totalling 25 units, plus 38 crystals.

That bill outweighs 9,313 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 963 of the 1,552 Carpenter ones, and 337 recipes nest deeper.

Only 3 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 35 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 16 Water Shard, 8 Wind Cluster, 6 Fire Crystal and 3 other kinds.

The chain crosses four disciplines — Carpenter to Lv 50, Blacksmith to Lv 50, Alchemist to Lv 41 and Armorer to Lv 26 — so no single class can finish it unaided.

6 of the 8 raw materials come out of the ground, and 2 of them are time-gated: Darksteel Ore (1:00) and Scarlet Sap (3:00). The widest gap between consecutive opening times is 22 Eorzean hours, about 64 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Steel Ingot has the widest use: 125 recipes call for it, spanning seven of the eight crafting classes.