Aesthete's Earrings of Gathering ★★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Aesthete's Earrings of Gathering is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 3 intermediates — Merbau Lumber ×3, Defthand's Dissolvent ×2 and Megalania Leather ×1 — which resolve to 8 distinct raw materials totalling 36 units, plus 28 crystals.

That bill outweighs 11,383 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 1,184 of the 1,552 Carpenter ones, and 4,464 recipes nest deeper.

Only 4 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 24 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 10 Wind Cluster, 8 Ice Cluster, 4 Lightning Cluster and 2 other kinds.

The chain crosses three disciplines — Carpenter 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), Merbau Log (8:00, 20:00) and 1 other. The widest gap between consecutive opening times is 8 Eorzean hours, about 23 real-world minutes.

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