Aesthete's Cap of Crafting ★★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Aesthete's Cap of Crafting is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 3 intermediates — Duskcourt Cloth ×4, Defthand's Dissolvent ×3 and Megalania Leather ×1 — which resolve to 8 distinct raw materials totalling 48 units, plus 36 crystals.

That bill outweighs 12,691 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 1,860 of the 1,968 Weaver ones, and 4,464 recipes nest deeper.

Only 4 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 32 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 16 Lightning Cluster, 12 Wind Cluster, 6 Water Cluster and 1 other kind.

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

3 of the 8 raw materials come out of the ground, and 3 of them are time-gated: Ashen Alumen (10:00, 22:00), Duskblooms (4:00, 16:00) and 1 other. The widest gap between consecutive opening times is 6 Eorzean hours, about 18 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Megalania Leather has the widest use: 50 recipes call for it, spanning six of the eight crafting classes.