Nightsteel Alembic ★★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Nightsteel Alembic is 4 crafting steps deep and needs 7 intermediates — Nightsteel Ingot ×4, Silvergrace Ingot ×4, Hawk's Eye Sand ×3 and 4 others — which resolve to 15 distinct raw materials totalling 75 units, plus 53 crystals.

That bill outweighs 13,370 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 1,415 of the 1,441 Armorer ones, and 1 recipe nests deeper.

Only 4 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 49 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 12 Fire Crystal, 9 Fire Cluster, 6 Earth Cluster and 5 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.

9 of the 15 raw materials come out of the ground, and 5 of them are time-gated: Hawk's Eye (6:00, 18:00), Nightsteel Ore (6:00, 18:00) and 3 others. The widest gap between consecutive opening times is 9 Eorzean hours, about 26 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Gold Ingot has the widest use: 184 recipes call for it, spanning seven of the eight crafting classes.