Neo-Ishgardian Earring of Fending ★★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Neo-Ishgardian Earring of Fending is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 3 intermediates — Merbau Lumber ×2, Grade 3 Vitality Alkahest ×1 and Lignum Vitae Lumber ×1 — which resolve to 8 distinct raw materials totalling 23 units, plus 23 crystals.

That bill outweighs 8,647 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 869 of the 1,552 Carpenter ones, and 4,464 recipes nest deeper.

Only 4 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 19 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 7 Wind Crystal, 6 Ice Cluster, 6 Wind Cluster and 2 other kinds.

The chain crosses two disciplines — Carpenter to Lv 80 and Alchemist to Lv 80 — so no single class can finish it unaided.

4 of the 8 raw materials come out of the ground, and 2 of them are time-gated: Imperial Fern (0:00, 12:00) and Merbau Log (8:00, 20:00). The widest gap between consecutive opening times is 8 Eorzean hours, about 23 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Lignum Vitae Lumber has the widest use: 134 recipes call for it, spanning seven of the eight crafting classes.