Exarchic Cane ★★★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Exarchic Cane is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 4 intermediates — Grade 4 Mind Alkahest ×2, Silver Beech Lumber ×2, Solstice Ingot ×2 and 1 other — which resolve to 10 distinct raw materials totalling 37 units, plus 43 crystals.

That bill outweighs 11,564 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 1,209 of the 1,552 Carpenter ones, and 4,464 recipes nest deeper.

Only 6 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 37 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 15 Wind Cluster, 9 Ice Cluster, 7 Wind Crystal and 3 other kinds.

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

6 of the 10 raw materials come out of the ground, and 3 of them are time-gated: Hard Water (4:00, 16:00), Silver Beech Log (6:00, 18:00) and 1 other. The widest gap between consecutive opening times is 8 Eorzean hours, about 23 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Dwarven Mythril Nugget has the widest use: 154 recipes call for it, spanning seven of the eight crafting classes.