Palladium Needle

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Palladium Needle is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 4 intermediates — Palladium Nugget ×2, Durium Nugget ×1, Slate Whetstone ×1 and 1 other — which resolve to 6 distinct raw materials totalling 22 units, plus 32 crystals.

That bill outweighs 8,402 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 1,234 of the 2,216 Goldsmith ones, and 4,464 recipes nest deeper.

Only 10 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 22 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 27 Wind Crystal and 5 Fire Crystal.

The chain crosses two disciplines — Goldsmith to Lv 69 and Carpenter to Lv 68 — so no single class can finish it unaided.

All 6 raw materials are gathered, and not one of their spots is timed, so nothing in the tree waits on the Eorzean clock.

Of the intermediates, Durium Nugget has the widest use: 142 recipes call for it, spanning seven of the eight crafting classes.