Ruby Barding ★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Ruby Barding is 3 crafting steps deep and needs 4 intermediates — Tungsten Steel Ingot ×2, Dwarven Cotton ×1, Dwarven Mythril Ingot ×1 and 1 other — which resolve to 6 distinct raw materials totalling 22 units, plus 36 crystals.

That bill outweighs 8,402 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 808 of the 1,441 Armorer ones, and 337 recipes nest deeper.

Only 14 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 22 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 7 Earth Crystal, 7 Fire Crystal, 7 Ice Crystal and 3 other kinds.

The chain crosses three disciplines — Armorer to Lv 80, Blacksmith to Lv 80 and Weaver to Lv 78 — so no single class can finish it unaided.

4 of the 6 raw materials come out of the ground, and one of them is time-gated: Tungsten Ore (10:00, 22:00). The widest gap between consecutive opening times is 12 Eorzean hours, about 35 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Dwarven Mythril Ingot has the widest use: 168 recipes call for it, spanning seven of the eight crafting classes.