Purpure Bead ★★★

Nothing in this list is craftable in turn, so one Purpure Bead is a single step: 6 units of material drawn from 2 base items, plus 4 crystals.

That bill outweighs 4,542 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 643 of the 2,216 Goldsmith ones, and 9,374 recipes nest deeper.

1 of the 2 raw materials come out of the ground, and one of them is time-gated: Purpure Shell Chip (6:00, 18:00). The widest gap between consecutive opening times is 12 Eorzean hours, about 35 real-world minutes.

Purpure Bead is itself consumed by 43 further recipes, spanning six of the eight crafting classes.