Nightsteel Pliers ★★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Nightsteel Pliers is 4 crafting steps deep and needs 6 intermediates — Nightsteel Ingot ×6, Hawk's Eye Sand ×3, Gold Ingot ×1 and 3 others — which resolve to 14 distinct raw materials totalling 73 units, plus 54 crystals.

That bill outweighs 13,354 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 1,896 of the 1,932 Blacksmith ones, and 1 recipe nests deeper.

Only 4 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 50 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 18 Fire Crystal, 9 Fire Cluster, 8 Earth Cluster and 4 other kinds.

The chain crosses three disciplines — Blacksmith to Lv 70, Alchemist to Lv 70 and Goldsmith to Lv 68 — so no single class can finish it unaided.

9 of the 14 raw materials come out of the ground, and 4 of them are time-gated: Hawk's Eye (6:00, 18:00), Nightsteel Ore (6:00, 18:00) and 2 others. The widest gap between consecutive opening times is 10 Eorzean hours, about 29 real-world minutes.

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