Exarchic Hose of Fending ★★★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Exarchic Hose of Fending is 3 crafting steps deep and needs 5 intermediates — Grade 4 Vitality Alkahest ×2, Saffron Cloth ×2, Thylacoleo Leather ×2 and 2 others — which resolve to 9 distinct raw materials totalling 36 units, plus 43 crystals.

That bill outweighs 11,383 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 1,681 of the 1,844 Leatherworker ones, and 337 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 Earth Cluster, 9 Lightning Cluster and 2 other kinds.

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

5 of the 9 raw materials come out of the ground, and 3 of them are time-gated: Hard Water (4:00, 16:00), Raindrop Cotton Boll (10:00, 22:00) and 1 other. The widest gap between consecutive opening times is 6 Eorzean hours, about 18 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Dwarven Cotton has the widest use: 165 recipes call for it, spanning eight of the eight crafting classes.